Junckers has manufactured solid hardwood floors for over 60 years, combining durability, low carbon impact and proven quality, says David Papworth, general manager, Junckers
Tell me a little about the history of your company?
Junckers was founded in the ‘30s by a Danish forester, Flemming Juncker. At the time the Danish forests were going to rack and ruin due to a lack of an economic use for timber. Flemming Juncker set about finding an economic use, producing railway sleepers for the Danish national railway. When a local architect visited the Junckers workshop to ask whether they could produce timber flooring, Flemming Juncker set about creating mechanised machinery to create 3.7m length floor boards from multiple timber staves.
From here, Junckers solid hardwood flooring business was started. Today, not only do we still use the machinery created by Flemming Juncker, but the Danish forests are both prosperous and well managed. Thanks to Flemming Juncker it could be said that Junckers was a sustainably managed business before the term was widely known.
When and why did you join the company?
I joined Junckers in December 2016, having spent 30+ years with leading international building products companies. For me, the opportunity to strengthen Junckers’ skills, business processes and flooring industry partners has been irresistible.
Why are your company’s products different than your competitors’ products and what’s the secret to creating a successful flooring product?
Junckers has been manufacturing solid hardwood floors for more than 60 years. In terms of longevity, lowest lifetime cost, low embodied carbon and quality of manufacture, a Junckers floors is unrivalled.
What’s the secret to a successful flooring installation?
We’re proud to work with a network of approved flooring contractors, many of whom are second and third generation family-owned businesses. It’s the skills, experience and professionalism of these floor fitters and floor finishers who create the magnificent solid hardwood floors which are admired and valued across the UK and Ireland in residential homes, offices, public spaces and sports activity spaces. Yes, we manufacture a top-quality product, but without our installation partners, there wouldn’t be any floors to walk on!
What three challenges do you feel the industry is facing and what are you doing to overcome these (sustainability, supply, consumer confidence, etc)?
The flooring industry in 2026 faces a number of challenges although this is in itself nothing new. There are issues with labour shortages, rising costs, and environmental regulations to adhere to. We work hard to make it as straight-forward as we can for customers and specifiers to fulfil environmental standards and regulations by completing independently verified certification and accreditation schemes that enables clients to compare like for like. We’re committed to on-going development and up-skilling and hold regular training sessions with our network of contractors on floor laying and maintenance. We strongly believe that equipping our network with the latest information and updating them on new industry regulations leads to more efficiency, greater working conditions and less wastage.
Can you give an outline of your most popular product ranges and explain a bit about them?
As market leaders, we’re most known for our sports and activity flooring. The reason why is simple – our press dried solid wood floors are absolutely unrivalled both in terms of performance and longevity which is of course closely linked to lifecycle costs. In the past 10-15 years, the sustainability element has also become an increasingly important factor, and that’s also something we score very highly on.
While we couldn’t be prouder to have installed our floors at world-class arenas used for the Olympic Games, World Championships and the like, we know that all the attributes that qualify our floors for these prestigious sporting venues are also highly relevant to local schools and colleges, leisure centres and village halls up and down the country. A hard-wearing floor that can be refurbished up to ten times in its lifetime will outlast any other playing surface. In fact, at the time when a Junckers floor needs refurbishing, another flooring surface will need to be replaced entirely, and this will cause more carbon emissions and put more pressure on landfill sites. In addition, our floors are made from a natural resource, comes from a managed forest which safeguards precious ecosystems, is manufactured in a carbon-neutral facility and can often be reused and/or repurposed. All of these factors make an enormous difference to our customers when it comes to funding. More and more they have to demonstrate using responsibly sourced and manufactured products and materials and for schools and public buildings new measurements on embodied carbon are imminent.
How important do you feel offering a bespoke and unique flooring solution is to a business?
Clients, architects and designers invest their time and energies into creating inspiring spaces for work, play and rest. We are fortunate to be given the opportunity to help them bring their visions to reality. With solid hardwood floors, each floor is unique with the natural look and feel inherent in timber, including oak, ash, maple and beech.
Is sustainability and ethical manufacturing a key commitment to your business, and if so, why?
It is, and this is in fact nothing new at Junckers. It’s the way the company has always worked. We’re absolutely committed to providing a wholly sustainable product and work hard to establish proven evidence that our floors are sourced and made in a sustainable, ethical way. On the world stage, we’ve signed up to the UN Global Compact and Science Based Target initiatives and we have environmental management systems covering the working environment in place.
This is an area where we all have to take responsibility. It’s not enough to show a picture of a forest or branches of a tree on brochures or on a website – we all have to come together to counteract the climate emergency we’re facing.
What innovation can your clients expect from you in the future?
We think the ability to reuse, repurpose and refurbish is more and more important. In the last few years, the architectural community and industry stakeholders have highlighted the importance of using our existing building stock – refurbishing and updating, rather than demolishing and building new as a major way to reduce carbon emissions. This train of thought also relates to building materials. A product and material that can be recycled, reused or repurposed contributes to a more circular economy and I believe, a more responsible way of working.
In the past few years, we’ve introduced a Reuse Scheme which is proving very successful. We work with specialist partners in the flooring industry to lift Junckers floors that need to be replaced that can be used as flooring in another location or repurposed as a building material. You will have seen reclaimed floors with old line marking paint randomly placed across the floorboards – a very popular look in retail and hospitality settings, but a solid hardwood floor can be sanded back to bare wood and refinished. This makes the floor look new again, it’s quite extraordinary.
In Denmark, our parent company has even launched a service whereby floors can be lifted and then refinished in the factory. This was done in a large housing complex that was refurbished last year. Instead of ripping the floors out and treating them as waste, they were refinished and reinstalled.
How robust is your supply chain in the face of global issues such as war?
As a company, we work with large, global companies and contractors as well as smaller projects. Even though the square meterage can vary enormously, all our customers have to be able to put their trust in us. Due diligence and financial checks alone aren’t enough. We have robust practices in place to mitigate against business disruption due to geopolitical factors, over-reliance on raw material sources, cyber security threats and many other risks to avoid disruption to our clients’ construction timelines.
What flooring trends are you seeing at the moment, and how do these influence your product development?
More and more, we are asked about the sustainability and longevity of our product. The two go hand-in-hand for specifiers and are intrinsically linked to securing funding for any public buildings. Another area that is increasingly important to our customers is maintenance. You might not think of maintaining floors as a trend but the ability to refurbish to keep floors looking beautiful and performing well makes a massive difference to the lifetime cost of a floor.
Herringbone and patterned parquet floors continue to be very popular and we’re seeing a growing preference for warmer colours – browns and warm natural colours rather than greys. We’re launching a new unfinished Single Steve floor and several new colours in our Eco 2K Floor Oil this year. This is one of our most popular finishing products. It can be used with or without a hardener and it can be over-coated with one of our water-based lacquers.
Where do you see the company in five years?
Approaching a century in business, Junckers will continue to innovate.
The continuing pressure on our world’s natural resources will likely see greater demand for sustainably produced, natural building materials that reliably perform throughout a buildings 60-year design life. I feel confident Junckers is well positioned to fulfil this need.
www.junckers.co.uk
