Contemporary and timeless …
Such is our world in Sweden: mountains, lakes, shorelines, thousands of islands, and enormous forests provide plenty of inspiration for innovative products. We Swedes have always had brilliant ideas. They range from the invention of the match to the safety belt or three-layer parquet. But in spite of all their inventiveness, the people of Sweden have kept their feet firmly on the ground and we have plenty of that. Statistically each resident has an area of 50,000 m² available to themself.
Good founders
Jan Söderberg is the export manager of Berg & Berg. What’s more: he founded the company with Ulf Palmberg in 1996. What does the Berg & Berg brand mean today to this father of three?
Jan, when did you first become interested in wood?
As a Swede, you come into contact with forests and wood from childhood. I grew up with them and, after studying engineering, worked first of all for a door manufacturer and then in my own moulding production. As soon as I got an opportunity to help develop parquet production, I was fired with enthusiasm. With parquet, more than with almost any other timber product, you can see the beauty of the raw material in every single board. That fascinated me.
From forest to floor, so to speak?
Yes, in 1996 the opportunity arose to take over an existing factory which had earlier been manufacturing doors. I sought out the best technician to be found in Sweden: Ulf Palmberg. And he became my partner in this project. Together with my German friend, Stephan von Schreitter, we redeveloped the factory from scratch. The name Berg & Berg came about, by the way, from the end of Ulf’s name and mine; so in 1996, Palmberg and Söderberg became Berg & Berg.
What does the brand of Berg & Berg stand for?
We manufacture beautiful wooden flooring in high end quality at fair and affordable prices. I still enjoy making such products and receiving customer recognition for doing so. Customers can expect not only that our products will look beautiful but that they will also be top quality. Our main markets, which are in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, are among the most discerning in the world and have some of the most challenging climatic conditions. Berg & Berg parquet fulfills their requirements: best technical quality, flawless biology for living and reasonable prices.
And the raw material, wood?
Very important, of course. We do our best only to use timber which comes from the forests of our owners. The advantages are shorter transport routes and the high quality of Swedish timber. The trees grow more slowly here in the North and so are denser and harder, which is a distinct advantage for a wooden floor. The trees here are less closely packed and so are able to put out more branches in the lower trunk section. This gives our floors their particularly distinctive look.
The look is, of course, important for a floor. But what about its technical properties?
Those are at least as important but we take that for granted. We use a core layer of solid, slowlygrown pine with vertical annual rings: an important reason for the superior dimensional stability of our floors. HDF or chipboard would certainly be cheaper but it would not meet our high quality requirements.
Added to this is our Svedloc Plus profile: a Berg & Berg patented system, which combines the advantages of a tongue and groove joint with those of a click profile system. Easy to install – both for the professional fitter and the inexperienced amateur. With or without glue.
That sounds like a well thought-out product. Is it worth all the effort and expense?
Oh, yes. And I’m not talking about revenue. I’m talking about the naturalness and environmental friendliness of our products. And about the opportunity to bring such an original and durable material of this kind into your home. Digitalised laminate or PVC floors might look deceptively genuine, but they don’t come anywhere near the stories that original Berg & Berg floors can tell.
The kingdom for
beautiful floors
Such is our world in Sweden: mountains, lakes, shorelines, thousands of islands, and enormous forests provide plenty of inspiration for innovative products. We Swedes have always had brilliant ideas. They range from the invention of the match to the safety belt or three-layer parquet. But in spite of all their inventiveness, the people of Sweden have kept their feet firmly on the ground and we have plenty of that. Statistically each resident has an area of 50,000 m2 available to themself.
Quality from Sweden
It’s probably no wonder that, as well as inventing the three-layer parquet, we are also producing it here at Berg&Berg. Our philosophy here at Berg&Berg is to keep the whole manufacturing process in our own hands. We buy our wood from the forest owners in our region and we utilize the whole tree during the production. This is part of our general ecological concept. Berg&Berg is the market leader for ecological parquet. In order to live up to this claim we undergo regular, comprehensive audits by Natureplus, the quality seal for environmentally compatible, healthy living products in Europe. We stand for 100% local and high quality manufacturing. It goes without saying that Berg&Berg floors are beautiful and visually timeless.
Many reasons to decide for an original wood floor made by Berg&Berg.
