Marri is the most varied floor we sell — honey and cream through to deep brown, with black gum veins running through it. Decorating around it works best when you let the floor be the feature and keep everything else quieter than you first think.
Here is what we have learned from ten years of laying it in Western Australian homes.
Marri is beautiful and it is busy.
The colour moves within a single board, not just between boards, and the gum veining adds a second layer of pattern on top of that. In a room, it reads as movement rather than a flat tone.
That means the floor is doing a lot of the visual work already. Rooms where Marri looks its best are usually the ones where the walls, the joinery and the larger furniture stay restrained and let the floor carry the character.
It also means a small sample will mislead you. Which brings us to the thing that matters most.
This is the part we do differently, and it is the single most useful thing for anyone styling a room around Marri.
Because Marri is so varied, we show you your own batch — the actual boards going into your home — before we install. Not a sample board. The floor you are getting.
Our Osborne Park showroom has Marri down beside every other species we sell, which is the only honest way to judge colour, and the iPad in the showroom has the homes we have already finished so you can see whole rooms rather than offcuts.
Marri photographs badly and looks different under every light. A screen is the worst possible way to choose it.
New homes usually take the 180mm. Renovations usually take the 130mm.
That split is mostly practical rather than aesthetic — renovation customers are often matching or extending something already in the house, and the existing board width decides it.
Worth knowing if you are planning: the 130mm Marri is being discontinued, and a wider range of 180mm and 220mm arrives in January 2027.
If you are matching a narrow floor after that, there are two routes. Most customers upgrade the whole floor to 180mm Marri, which is not uncommon and reads as a natural upgrade rather than a compromise. If you must stay at 130mm, 130mm Rustic Blackbutt has a very similar appearance with a bit more colour, and it is $209 a square metre rather than $239.
I would put Marri through an entire home.
I would avoid laundries and bathrooms — anywhere likely to see standing water. That is the only restriction I would put on it.
Everywhere else it earns its place: living areas, kitchens, bedrooms, hallways. We have installed it in all of those across Western Australia for over ten years.
Marks and small dents become the patina of a natural timber floor.
Most of our customers come to see them that way rather than as damage. Every floor ships with a care kit — wax, a repair kit, and black wax for the gum veins — so the marks that do bother you can be dealt with. A board past repair can be cut out and replaced, because the floor is prefinished.
If the idea of a floor changing over time is unwelcome, that is worth knowing about yourself before you choose Marri. Some people want a floor that looks identical on day one and day one thousand, and for them an oak is the better answer.
Mainly country people and local Western Australians.
There is a logic to that which I like. The timber is salvaged off Western Australian farms, and it is Western Australian country people who most often want it in their homes. Many have had Marri or blackbutt before and are looking for a floor to match what they grew up with.
Marri also arrives with a reputation already attached. Most people here know it from furniture before they know it as a floor — a Marri dining table is understood as an heirloom piece, and people carry that same sense of value into the floor.
Come and stand on it. Bring a cushion, a paint chip, a photo of your kitchen — whatever the floor has to live with.
Then ask to see your batch before installation, and give us three to six months lead time so there is room to get it right.
Specifications and current pricing are on the Marri timber flooring page, and the whole range is in the Lifewood price guide. Or call the showroom and describe your room — that conversation is usually faster than any amount of reading.