Softer than an ironbark.
Steadier than an oak.
Older than most of the houses it will be laid in.
A short, honest brief for specifiers, builders and owners considering a timber the Australian market knows mostly from garden benches — and rarely from floors.
Teak is softer than every mainstream Australian flooring species — including the oaks.
Janka measures the force needed to press an 11.28 mm steel ball halfway into a piece of timber. It's a standardised proxy for dent resistance: dropped tools, dragged furniture, stiletto heels. Here is where teak actually sits.
This is where most comparisons stop. But hardness is what a timber resists for an afternoon. Stability is what it does for fifty years.
Ships have been floating on teak for two thousand years. A house is a small ask.On why the navy got there first
A material you have probably met — as a garden bench. Not as a floor.
"Teak" in most Australian minds means plantation outdoor furniture. What we're describing here is a different material: Tectona grandis grown slowly in Javanese forests for 80 to 150 years, then lived inside a building for most of the 20th century, then salvaged when the building came down.
Javanese joglo & limasan houses
Traditional timber homes. The soko guru columns and tumpang sari ceiling structures are typically 80 to 150 years old, and now often dismantled as owners rebuild in concrete.
Dutch colonial warehouses & stations
Late 19th to early 20th century buildings — factories, warehouses, train stations — built when old-growth teak was the default structural hardwood for the region.
Decommissioned railway sleepers
Indonesian railways historically ran on teak, balau, merbau and ulin. They are now being replaced with concrete, releasing a steady supply of heartwood sleepers.
Bridges & jetties
Teak's chemistry made it the default for water-facing structural timber across the archipelago. Decommissioned stock surfaces wherever infrastructure is being rebuilt.
The difference between a 100-year tree and a 20-year tree is measurable.
Most "old-growth is better" claims are vibes. Here, the claim has a paper behind it.
Lukmandaru and Takahashi (2008) tested teak heartwood across tree ages and found 30–51-year heartwood materially more termite-resistant than 8-year plantation heartwood. The active compound is tectoquinone, which accumulates in the cell walls over time and does not leach out with age.
The boards in this brief carry that chemistry because they came from trees that ran long.
Lukmandaru, G. & Takahashi, K. (2008). Variation in the natural termite resistance of teak (Tectona grandis) wood as a function of tree age. Annals of Forest Science, 65(7).Three properties carry the case — none of them is hardness.
What teak lacks in surface hardness it pays back in stability, in chemistry, and in a climate-performance profile that matters more in Brisbane than in Melbourne.
Stability
Tangential shrinkage of 5.3%. T/R ratio of 2.0. At the low end of the tropical hardwood range and far tighter than most eucalypts, which typically run 6–8%.
In flooring, this is the metric that determines whether boards gap in winter and cup in summer. Teak barely moves. Fifty-year-old teak boards, indoors, look like they were laid last decade.
Chemistry
Teak heartwood is roughly 35% quinone derivatives — principally tectoquinone, plus lapachol and desoxylapachol — alongside caoutchouc-like rubber resins and impregnated silica.
That chemistry is why teak is AS 5604 Class 1 durability (above-ground and in-ground), why it has demonstrated marine-borer resistance above 60 years, and why it is the only serious candidate among mainstream flooring timbers for continuous use through a kitchen, a laundry, or a bathroom.
Climate fit
Empirical movement: ~1% per 4% moisture-content change. Thermal conductivity 0.116–0.128 W/mK — close to the solid-wood average and slightly below European oak.
Teak equilibrates slowly, so acclimatisation must be thorough. But the resulting stability, in the humid northern half of the country where oak cups and eucalypts check, is honestly exceptional. It also sits well over hydronic underfloor heating at the 27°C surface cap.
The gold in a teak floor is not a stain. It is the tree's own chemistry, warming in the light.On what you are actually seeing
A timber that ambers, rather than fades.
The golden-honey tone most people associate with teak is not a finish and not a stain. It is the visible signature of the same oils and quinone compounds that make teak dimensionally stable and termite-resistant — surfacing through the grain.
Freshly milled, a reclaimed teak board runs from pale honey through mid gold to a deeper amber. Over the first months indoors, exposed to ordinary light, that palette deepens. This is the "ambering" effect — UV slowly oxidising the natural oils into a warmer, richer gold-brown.
Crucially, indoors the patina stops there. Teak only silvers when it is rained on and sun-struck simultaneously — the characteristic weathered grey of an outdoor deck. A teak floor inside a house holds its golden register essentially indefinitely, enriched by a light recoat every seven to ten years.
Underfoot the feeling is unlike a dense eucalypt and unlike a kiln-dried oak. The natural oils give the timber a slight waxy warmth to the touch; the moderate hardness means it yields marginally, giving a slightly softer, warmer walk. Floors laid in the nineteenth century are still being walked on today. The boards now arriving from Javanese salvage yards carry the same chemistry.
Where this timber actually fits.
Reclaimed Javanese teak does not win every row in this matrix. It is a particular material for a particular kind of project — and being specific about that is how a specifier builds trust with a client.
| Reclaimed Javanese Teak |
Reclaimed AU Hardwood |
New Solid AU Hardwood |
New Engineered European Oak |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hardness (Janka) | 4.7 kN — softest on the chart | 8–14 kN | 8–14 kN | ~6.0 kN |
| Stability tangential shrinkage |
5.3% — lowest of any here | 6–8% | 6–8% | ~7% |
| Wet-area suitability | Excellent — natural oils, marine history | Interior only | Interior only | Interior only |
| Natural durability AS 5604 |
Class 1 equivalent | Class 1–2 | Class 1–2 | Class 3 (treated) |
| Board width | 60–180 mm (stock-dependent) | 75–130 mm | 85–180 mm | 140–260 mm |
| Length runs | 300–1,800 mm (variable) | Variable | Up to 5.4 m | Up to 2.4 m |
| Aesthetic register | Warm golden-brown, patina, nail holes, character grade | Dense red-brown, Aussie heritage | Uniform, new-cut | Pale to mid, contemporary |
| Provenance story | 80–150 year Javanese heritage | 20th-century Australian building heritage | None — new milled | None — new forest |
| Lead time | 12–16 weeks (container cadence) | Stock-dependent, 2–12 weeks | 4–8 weeks | In-stock typical |
A floor with eighty to a hundred and fifty years in it before you ever walk on it.
- Hardness data: USDA Forest Products Laboratory Wood Handbook; Wood Database (wood-database.com); Australian WoodSolutions species profiles.
- Stability & chemistry: USDA FPL shrinkage data; Rudman et al., Nature (1958) on tectoquinone; Lukmandaru & Takahashi, Annals of Forest Science (2008).
- Durability: AS 5604 Timber — natural durability ratings.
- Flooring installation: AS 4786.2 flooring sanding & finishing; ATFA technical guidance; FWPA Interim Industry Standard — Recycled Timber: Visually Graded Decorative Products.
- Plantation & supply: Perum Perhutani; Jepara, Semarang, Surabaya reclamation supply chains.
Values shown are species averages at 12% moisture content. Actual performance varies with tree age, growth region, log position and processing. For project-critical or compliance-critical specification, use batch test certificates and engineer sign-off.