Decorating Guides

Types of Flooring for Open Floor Plans

A home with a spacious floor plan — a living, family or fantastic room open into the dining and kitchen areas — generates a sense of massive space within the house when you choose the right flooring material. If you use different materials for each one of these regions, you interrupt the flow between rooms. If you must use a different material for the kitchen, avoid using contrasting colours between flooring choices; choose the shade of this flooring material for the kitchen that blends or matches together with the flooring material throughout the rest of the space.

Natural Stone

For any kind of open floor plan, to create the rooms transition to one another, choose continuous flooring. Butting a wood floor from the family area against a tile flooring in the kitchen jars the eyes at the transition — and it normally doesn’t look right. Because kitchens call for hardy, easy-to-clean floors, go with natural stone tile throughout the space, but choose materials that alternate colours, like slate tiles with separate tile colours that go from blues and grays to rust and beige with multiple colors in between. Well-placed area rugs add warmth to dialog or dining places in a house with an open floor plan.

Durable Strand-Woven Bamboo

Strand-woven bamboo flooring can work in a kitchen — along with the rest of the house — because of its hardiness and resilience. Strand-woven bamboo is the most hard-wearing and durable choice for an open floor plan; only confirm the producers used eco-friendly adhesives in the process of creating the flooring. On the Janka hardness scale, strand-woven bamboo is more difficult than most American hardwoods, coming in at 2900, well over hickory, pine, maple as well as ash, which vary from 1290 to 1800 on the scale. Another benefit of bamboo is that it is an eco-friendly option.

Mediterranean Warmth

In a house with a Mediterranean, Tuscany or Spanish architectural influences, saltillo tiles in octagon or square shapes bring warmth to your continuous flooring. You can extend these tiles to outdoor patio areas to make a unified appearance between the interior and exterior living spaces in the house. Though tiles traditionally give off a cold atmosphere, saltillo tiles come in varying colors of browns, that gives your open floor program a warm, earthy foundation.

Low-Maintenance Aggregate Flooring

For open floor plans, you can’t beat the price and durability of the epoxy aggregate continuous floor compared with other materials. This flooring seems seamless and produces open places seem even bigger. Color and design options are nearly limitless, since you can decide on the shapes, sizes and also the colours of the aggregates from hundreds of options. The aggregate is made of small chips, pebbles and stones and is hand-floated over concrete or wood for a smooth effect, and also covered with an epoxy sealant. It allows for layout options that have such things as border colour changes and intriguing patterns in entryways.

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