Ask just about any interior designer, and they will tell you that all great design begins with the floor. Rooms are built around the flooring. With all of the innovation in flooring over the past several years, the home design industry is definitely seeing some new trends emerging.
Luxury Vinyl Tile Takes Top Awards
Many factors are making luxury vinyl tile (LVT) the fastest growing category in the market. According Tanja Kern, on the Flooring Trends magazine website, it is innovations in design and performance that are making LVT so popular.
“Thanks to advances in technology,” noted Kern in her blog on the future of LVT, “the flooring impressively replicates high-end materials like hardwood and stone but a fraction of the cost. Its thinness makes it easier to match to other surfaces during installation, and its performance and durability make it a logical solution for high-traffic commercial projects and residences for homeowners who want ease of maintenance.”
Andrew Young at City Tile in Murfreesboro, Tennessee is seeing LVT being used on walls in place of either repurposed barn wood or the ever-present shiplap seen in so much remodeling on HGTV.
Creative Floor “Blending” as Part of Interior Design
Art is taking over function when it comes to transitions from one type of flooring into another. No longer is the passing from one type of flooring to another in a home a rough juxtaposition. Instead they are becoming artistic mixed-media masterpieces.
New flooring innovations are making it easier to create a beautiful mosaic blending different types of flooring like wood and tile. Instead of having a distracting piece of white marble or a bland wood transition bar when moving from room to room, there can be a beautiful design that works with the walls and furnishings.
Using a product like luxury vinyl flooring makes it even faster as it is easy to cut a design and lay different styles into a pattern or picture, much like a high-end inlaid wood floor, at a small fraction of the cost.
Cork is Seeing a Renaissance with Green Movement
Cork has been used for flooring since the 19th century, and the harvesting does not harm the tree from which it comes. A cork tree can live for more than 500 years.
With the continued interest in sustainable flooring products, cork floors are back on the list of “hot products” being used by top designers. Besides being eco-friendly, cork is easy to maintain, it absorbs sound, it stays at room temperature when it is cold outside keeping tootsies warm without a need for sox or slippers, and it is good for the back because it offers a cushion underfoot. It also comes in all kinds of colors and patterns.
According to Bob Villa.com, like with so many other products, technology is changing the face of cork – literally. It can now be made to look like wood or marble, but keep the properties of cork.
Make That 1,000 Pins of Gray
Gray and gray tones of blues, greens, beiges, and even pinks are here and they are not going to go anywhere soon. As a matter of fact, gray has recently overtaken beige as the top home wall color choice. And now floors are going gray, like the aging boomers who are having them installed (but so are Xers, and Millennials).
Playing well with all the gray-toned paints that are being seen in homes everywhere, gray-stained hardwood floors have racked up over 1,000 pins on Pinterest. But if you don’t want to deal with natural hardwoods, gray wood flooring can be found in a rainbow of tones in manufactured hardwood and laminate. Not to mention LVT and tile. These floors can be, like gray clothing, dressed up or down, work beside classic design or modern minimalism.
Wood is Not Simple Any More
Our society has gone wood-floor crazy because of their beauty and easy Swifter-care. Natural wood floors come in one-inch planks, wide planks and everything in-between. They can be aged, reclaimed, scraped, wire-brushed, bleached, pickled, and of course stained. They can be cut to have a consistent grain, or for the natural grain to be seen. And then there are all kinds of different woods, like oak and pine. These have different durability. Oak is going to stand up to women’s high heels a lot better than softer pine.
As a matter of fact, there is so much information about wood floors, we have a whole other blog on the City Tile website just about today’s wood flooring. Check out >Designer’s Secrets Guide to Choosing Wood Flooring.
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