SPC, laminate or engineered wood?

There is no single best floor, only the right floor for a given room. A busy food court, a private majlis and a poolside terrace ask three different questions of the same surface, and the honest answer usually comes down to three systems: rigid SPC, laminate, and engineered wood. Knowing what each is built to do makes the choice straightforward.

SPC — stone-plastic composite — is a rigid, dense core that is one hundred percent waterproof. It shrugs off standing water, heavy footfall and rolling loads, which makes it the default for commercial spaces, wet areas and anywhere a floor has to work hard without complaint. A typical build runs around 6.6mm with an acoustic backing, a hard wear layer, and slip and fire ratings suited to public interiors. It is the system you reach for when durability and moisture are the governing constraints.

Laminate is the value specialist: a photographic decor layer over a fibreboard core, sealed under a tough transparent wear layer that resists scratching and fading. It is warmer underfoot than stone-look SPC and considerably kinder to a budget, and modern Aqua grades close much of the old moisture gap — HARO's Tritty 200 Aqua is approved for damp rooms and rated to withstand standing water for twenty-four hours. For bedrooms, offices and residential interiors where cost and comfort matter more than total waterproofing, it earns its place.

Engineered wood is the luxury answer, and the only one of the three that is genuinely real timber. A three-to-four millimetre oak or walnut top layer over a stable cross-laminated core gives you the depth, grain and warmth of a solid-wood floor, refinishable over its life and ready for underfloor heating — without the seasonal movement that makes solid wood a liability in this climate. It is the specification for the rooms that set the tone of a home.

In practice the decision falls out of the room itself. Is water or heavy traffic the risk? SPC. Is the budget tight and the room dry? Laminate. Is this a space where the floor is meant to be felt as much as walked on? Engineered wood. We rarely sell from a catalogue — we bring samples into the space, read its light and its use, and match the system to what the room actually has to do.