How to Pick the Right Flooring for Your Home

How to Pick the Right Flooring for Your Home

Interior design starts long before you get to furniture, paint, and art. In fact, one of the biggest and most important interior design choices is selecting your flooring. It isn’t just the thing you walk on; it defines the colors and patterns that work in a space, can change what other materials you use, and can truly define one space from another (even if there are no walls in sight). Also, most houses use multiple floor coverings to fit each room’s needs; you want to make sure you pick the right materials, colors, styles, and additional flooring features, like in-floor heating or soundproofing, to best fit each room.

To help give you a baseline for which flooring options are best, we talked to a few designers and came together with a list of the top 5 high-quality flooring options they would recommend:

• Hardwood Floor: This was the number one choice by designers, due to its durability and diversity. It has almost unlimited grain and stain options, and can be laid in many patterns, making it able to fit almost any room’s shape and style. However, it can discolor over time and shrink/splinter with wear, and it’s very difficult to replace just a single hardwood floorboard.
  
  
• Ceramic Tile: One of the most consistently loved floorings, ceramic tiles are waterproof and comes in many alternative finishes, including some that look like wood. It offers simplicity in installation, but the grout lines can be hard to clean and tiles could possibly chip and crack under wear. Luckily, you can buy a few extra tiles, and would only need to replace ones that could become damaged.
  
  
• Marble Floor: Almost all the designers we talked to considered marble flooring the most luxurious flooring option. It’s easy to install, resistant to almost everything, and no two floors are the same. However, the cost is higher than almost all other flooring. Also note that marble comes in tile (like ceramic tile) and slab versions (tiles are easier to install, but slabs are far more captivating).
  
  
• Concrete: Starting to be considered one of the most high-end floorings, concrete has incredibly diverse options and is completely customizable with textures, colors, and patterns. It is the lowest maintenance flooring available, but it is very hard to install, and if your foundation moves at all, it can cause cracks or full fractures in the flooring.
  
  
• Bamboo Floor: Though technically a hardwood option, it’s such a unique product that designers call it out specifically enough to warrant mentioning. It has the quality and durability of other high-end hardwoods, but has the ease of installation and replacement of laminate flooring. However, it is more expensive than most hardwoods due to it being a more eco-friendly flooring option.