Craftmanship
In this article you will find
A floor is the one surface in a room that is always in contact with the people who live there. It carries the weight of daily life, and it carries something quieter too: where the wood grew, the hands that shaped it, and the place that gave it its character. For more than 45 years, Hakwood has made flooring. With its new collection of books, the company wanted to give that quieter part a voice.
Why the Story Deserved a Stage
It is straightforward to present a product. A specification sheet can describe a plank down to the millimeter. What it cannot describe is everything that came before the plank: a family, a landscape, and a way of working passed down across three generations. That story deserved a stage of its own.
The result is The Legacy of Wood, a brand book that tells the Hakwood story in image and in word. Alongside it sits a companion technical book holding the full range of finishes, dimensions, and options for the architects and designers Hakwood works with. One book speaks to the senses. The other answers the questions a project demands. Together they reflect how the company sees its own work.
"Understated, this luxury reveals itself through the nobility of carefully sourced and meticulously crafted wood, where human touch meets nature's memory."
A Family Anchored in the Land
Hakwood was founded in the Netherlands in 1979 and has passed across three generations of the same family. Today it is led by cousins Mark and Robert Hak, whose roles are as complementary as they are personal. Mark looks outward, toward new creative horizons. Robert looks inward, toward precision and the perfecting of every product. Between them, the brand holds both its imagination and its discipline.
Mark Hak
Mark joined in 1992, when the company still specialized in wall coverings for the DIY market. In the early 2000s he steered Hakwood into parquet flooring and built its international distribution, the move that shaped the premium brand it is today. He now oversees global sales and sources the raw material himself, primarily oak and ash from Germany and Eastern Europe. When he calls himself down to earth, the phrase carries more than it seems. He lives on a farm where he breeds livestock, and when work allows he escapes to Norway to fish in the wild.
Robert Hak
Robert joined in 2002, continuing a story he had known since childhood, when he spent his days following his father through the factory. He arrived with a background in mechanics and a clear ambition: to bring the company into the 21st century. Where the factory had relied on traditional machinery, he modernized the processes and the infrastructure, and today he leads production, planning, and IT. He has stayed grounded in the literal sense too, living a few kilometers from the factory with his wife and four children on a farm with cattle and pigs.
Drawn from Nature, Shaped by Hand
The factory sits on the edge of Biesbosch National Park, a freshwater delta of rivers, trees, and untamed vegetation. This is no coincidence of geography. The landscape is Hakwood's first reference point when developing a new color, texture, or finish. The colors, textures, and light of that environment feed directly into the range, which now holds almost 60 tones across light, medium, and dark families.
The same attention runs through the making. Knowledge of wood is taught hand to hand here, passed from one generation of craftsmen to the next. Every plank is air dried and kiln dried for stability, then selected, examined, and finished under repeated checks. The luxury Hakwood pursues is a quiet one, found in restraint rather than ornament, in the quality of the material and the care given to every detail.
"Each piece of wood is one of a kind, revealing its own natural character and soul."
Telling It in Image and Word
To capture all of this, Hakwood worked with two people whose craft matched its own. Photographer Alexandre Onimus spent time in the surrounding nature, in the lab, and at the factory, photographing the work as it happens rather than as a staged ideal. Writer Françoise-Claire Prodhon gave the story its language, drawing out the values beneath the surface and the people behind the brand. Together with the striking visual compositions by Scheltens & Abbenes, these perspectives shaped a narrative that is both powerful and emotionally resonant. Their distinctive imagery adds another layer to the story, translating craftsmanship, materiality and atmosphere into images that speak as eloquently as the words themselves.
The aim is not to sell a floor on the page. It is to let the story breathe in a more emotional register than a product can hold on its own, so that what is felt in the factory and nature around it, could be felt in a book.
What This Means for a Project
For the architects and designers who specify these floors, the story is not decoration. A material with a clear origin, a human hand, and an intent behind it brings something to a space that an anonymous surface cannot. Knowing where a floor comes from, and the thinking that shaped it, is part of designing with it.
The Legacy of Wood is an invitation to know that before the first plank is laid. The full story can be explored in the new book collection and across the Hakwood site, where each color, texture, and pattern carries the same legacy into the next project.
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