We have talked to you on other occasions about how to repurpose old parquet for different functions and thus give it a new life; elsewhere, we have focused on the fact that its inherent naturalness allows wooden flooring to be recycled or disposed of without issues. In itself, thinking of reusing parquet that once adorned the surfaces of your living or professional space to create a handy happy hour or work table, or an original headboard for beds and even frames, means already harboring the spark of creativity within you.

Put Ingenuity into Wooden Flooring

There is naturally a way to turn the spark into a genuine flame, and examples abound. For instance, “La Bottega Del Truciolaio,” a YouTuber specializing in wood, used oak parquet to create a Bluetooth speaker or even an LED lamp; thus, nothing prevents you from challenging yourself to unleash the artist’s imagination within you.

From Wild Nature to Domestic Parquet

The sculptor Eyevan Tumbleweed, known as Bennet Ewing, stated that he turned to art because, since childhood, he loved associating the bizarre shapes of certain natural objects with human faces. He began collecting scrap wood everywhere, in forests and gardens as well as on beach shores, which he gradually assembled to create unique faces that he displays in his workshop and art galleries. Thus, he also finds a face and body in the grain of the parquet that helps him bring other creatures and imaginary scenarios to life.

Wooden Floors, From Home to Open Sky

Nothing excludes parquet from being among the preferred raw materials of the Dutch Piet Hein Eek, who participates in the Salone del Mobile and has collaborated with Ikea, using reclaimed wood to create an installation displayed at the Crystal Ship festival in Ostend, Belgium. It is a portrait of a man and occupies almost the entire vertical wall of a three-story city building. It has a vaguely abstract taste and evokes the atmospheres of the Cubist movement. Not surprisingly, the Cubists, along with Futurists and Dadaists and other innovators, paved the way in art for the appreciation of fabric scraps, paper fragments, and wood, creating an ideal bridge between painting and sculpture.

Gentle Giants and Rappers, Parquet Hearts

Something similar was done by the Danish Thomas Dambo (Dumbo), who also revived pallets for packaging in his interior design projects and imaginative creatures for urban parks using parquet. For his part, with panels of discarded wooden materials, the rapper Luca Barcellona produced a 30-meter-long and over two-meter-high illustration, which was later auctioned for charity. The Operational Unit 2 of Psychiatric Emergency of the Stella Maris Foundation in Pisa, engaged in assisting children and adolescents with neuropsychiatric disorders, also worked on doing good with wood sourced from carpentry and industrial waste, transforming them into many little artists.

A parquet board, unlike the Archimedean lever, cannot lift the world: but one thing leads to another, starting from objects destined for the incinerator that Barbara Holmes and Tadashi Kawamata, among others, have respectively landed at 1045 Mission in San Francisco and the HKW in Berlin.