The grade names mislead almost everyone, so it is worth being precise. Natural, Neat and Select read like colour names and are nothing of the sort. They describe how much natural feature the boards carry, not what shade they are. Put a Neat pack beside a Natural pack and the colour family is identical. What differs is how much is going on in the timber.
Natural is the ABCD grade with the full range of knots, gum vein and board-to-board variation, on a 189mm board. Neat is a cleaner ABC grade on a narrower 136mm board, with the heaviest gum vein and largest knots filtered out before the pack is made up. Both carry a 3mm hardwood wear layer. Select is the tidiest of the three and comes with a 2mm wear layer.
One trade-off runs the opposite way to what people expect: a cleaner floor shows an individual scratch a little more plainly than a busy one, because there is less going on to absorb it.
The engineered core is what lets Australian hardwood go over a concrete slab or into an apartment where a solid strip floor would be difficult, and it moves far less with seasonal humidity than solid hardwood of the same width. Micro-bevelled edges, tongue and groove, glued down or floated. E1 emissions under 5ppm.
It is still timber, so the boards must be delivered and acclimatised in the room before installation. Australian hardwoods deepen and warm over the first year or two. Sydney supply and install, supply only, or bring your own installer.
14/2mm
