Installing hickory flooring in your home is like receiving a two-for-one deal. You’ll get a dramatic hardwood floor with a built-in insurance policy at no extra cost. That’s because hickory’s color variations and striking grain pattern are part and parcel of the hardest, most durable domestically harvested plank flooring available.
So, you can breathe easy when your mother-in-law begins doing the tango in her high heels in the living room, or the kids break out the hockey sticks and puck for a game in the upstairs hallway. The floor will handle it and continue to look new for generations.
Hickory grows at a snail’s pace, which results in the wood of extremes—in size, strength, and aesthetics. Long, wide planks in combination with extraordinary durability and variegated colorations provide for a dynamic and versatile flooring option equally at home in a rustic setting and in a more formal environment.
At Vermont Plank Flooring, we work with small-scale woodlot owners who are as patient as the hickory tree itself, allowing it to reach full maturity before harvesting. The results are healthy, sizable trees that, when milled, provide us with remarkable planks up to 12 or more inches wide and 12 or more feet long. That means fewer seams and more unbroken plank, providing continuity that adds to hickory’s innate beauty.
Hickory’s slow growth results in wood that is dense, stiff, and hard. There are some woods that are denser, or stiffer, or harder, but no commercial wood possesses all of these qualities simultaneously other than hickory. That makes hickory incredibly resistant to shocks, dents, bends, and scratches. Axe handles are also made of hickory, for good reason.
So, if you’ve got an active household with kids, pets, and that tango-dancing mother-in-law, you can sleep well at night knowing your hickory floors will still look great in the morning.
Hickory’s sloth-like growth has implications on its aesthetic qualities, as well, most notably the color variation between heartwood and sapwood. If you are looking for uniformity, you might consider a different species, such as select grade maple or cherry. By contrast, hickory’s pale- to reddish-brown heartwood, juxtaposed with creamy blonde sapwood and distinctive and dense bright gold grain patterns provides for some excitement on each and every board. Those elements can potentially seem overly busy on thinner boards, but Vermont Plank Flooring’s wide planks provide a more unified feel. Our custom finish department can also help you identify stain options that will work to harmonize hickory’s diverse elements.
Additionally, Vermont Plank Flooring offers hickory in select, character, and live sawn grades, providing degrees of variability. Select offers the greatest uniformity; character contains more color and grain variation.
If your castle is your home, hickory’s full-body armor makes it a great choice for the jousting hall. And for the rest of us, whose home is our castle, any room apt to host lots of traffic and activity— including kitchens, family rooms, living rooms, hallways, and stairs—will maintain its allure after even years of intense wear and tear.
The exception is rooms that face the prospect of moisture and wetness. Although some species (such as white oak) are moisture- and rot-resistant to a certain degree, hickory is not one of them. Therefore, if your project includes bathrooms, rooms in basements, or an application directly on concrete, we recommend Vermont Plank Flooring’s exceptional engineered hickory.
Hickory wood is prized in the southern United States for use in smoking, curing, and barbecuing meat. Its dense wood makes for a slow, even burn and adds to the meat’s flavor. In fact, the entire hickory tree is, in many ways, antithetical to today’s faster-is-better world; it’s simply in no rush at all. The average shagbark, which is the fastest-growing hickory species, is less than three inches in diameter and about 12 feet tall on its 20th birthday. It doesn’t produce nuts until approximately its 40th birthday and continues to do so for up to 300 years.
