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COMMERCIAL WOOD FLOORING by James Bodnar Commercial establishments use wood flooring to achieve a warm, non-commercial look. In this hair salon, the architects specified oak strip flooring. Specifying wood for high-traffic floors requires knowledge of tree types, finishes, and special treatments Over the centuries wood has been one of the most abundant flooring products, from the intricate, artistic parquet floors of Europe, to the hand-cut floor planks of early American homes. Until the introduction of synthetic floors, wood, stone, marble, and handknotted wool rugs were primarily underfoot. In 1863 Frederick Walton invented linoleum, the first synthetic floorcovering. By the 1940s — and especially after the Second World War— building booms in America found wood floors being bypassed in favor of