Flooring choices are a surprisingly exciting part of the process when designing a custom home. The countless variations of styles, textures, and colors can really liven up your home, giving distinct personality to different rooms.

The impact that flooring can make on the overall look and feel of your home is astounding, so it’s of utmost importance to go into the design process with a clear understanding of how different surfaces and shades can interact both with the other features of your home – such as cabinets or wall paint – and how they can intermingle with each other as you transition from one room to another.

Building a beautiful home is equal parts creativity, cohesion, and restraint. We’ll help you get ready for the decisions for your own custom designed home by running through several flooring options. We’ll discuss hard surfaces like Luxury Vinyl Tile, soft surfaces such as carpet, and various decorative tile surfaces, and how these floorings can play together in a complimentary way.

Hard Surface Flooring

Be it hardwood or Luxury Vinyl Tile, the clean look, classic aesthetic, and durability of hard surface flooring have made it as popular as ever before. While our parents’ homes may have been lined with wall-to-wall carpet, it’s much more common these days to see a modern home decked out with the crisp, straight lines and modern nuances of a hard surface.

If you’re considering a hard surface, here are a few tips to get you started down the line for choosing flooring for your home.

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• Consider lighter finishes. Light colored finishes such as bright greys or light wood can give your room a more open feeling. If you are working with a smaller space and want to make it feel a bit larger and more breezy, consider light colored floors. Combined with white cabinetry and alcove lighting, this can provide dramatic effect to your great room or kitchen, allowing light to brighten the area, giving it a feel of free flowing air and space.

• Don’t forget about dark finishes. While lighter colored flooring might feel a bit more modern, there are good reasons that dark hardwoods have been popular for centuries. Dark flooring can make a large space feel more intimate. Whether you’re working with an open floor plan or have designed a home with a large master suite or living room, choosing a dark wood grain can instantly make that large space feel more homey and comfortable. Additionally, dark flooring can make a bold impact when combined with the right lighting and decor, giving your home an element of high end design.

• Define space with rugs. One of the most exciting aspects of a hard surface floor is that you can break it up with rugs. The right rug can provide accents of color and style while dividing a room into sections, tricking your mind into seeing one large room as multiple components – such as a dining area vs a relaxation and television viewing zone.

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• Don’t match. Compliment. While you might feel compelled to match your cabinets and large furniture pieces to your flooring, it’s important to resist that urge. Matching woods or colors can give your home a rather monochromatic look. It can certainly work in some instances, but will typically come off looking rather muted.

• Don’t get too crazy with variation. While we do recommend picking complementary colors for your cabinetry, you don’t want to go to the extreme end of the spectrum. If your choices become too variant, your home can be a bit confusing and feel messy.

Soft Surface Flooring

Carpeting has lost a bit of the luster that it once had, but it is still a popular element, especially for bedrooms or other places where you are looking for a bit more traditional comfort. Modern designs shy from fully-carpeted, choosing instead to accent key areas with luscious, gentle carpet. Of course, like with hard surface flooring, we have a few tips and tricks to think about when considering this element for your new home and recommend taking a look at Mohawk for inspiration when it comes to carpet options and colors.

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• Get cozy. It probably goes without saying, but soft surfaces are an ideal choice for places where you want to feel warm and cozy. This can mean bedrooms, living rooms, or media rooms. Imagine anywhere that you might want to sit down, wrapped in a blanket with a warm cup of cocoa – these might be good places for carpeting.

• For the kids. Soft flooring is great for kids’ rooms as little ones tend to spend a lot of time on the floor, playing with their toys or wrestling with their siblings. If you don’t install carpeting for them to enjoy while crawling across the floor, consider a durable rug.

• Keep it neutral. Choosing neutral colors – beiges or greys – gives a room universal appeal. While your current bedding might look great with a specific color, you don’t want to be tied to these colors for the entire life of the carpeting, so its key to go with something that can stand the test of time, allowing you to live without worry about color clashing.

• Rugs? Yes. While it might seem a bit counter-intuitive to place a rug atop your carpet, but if done right, it can actually work rather well. In the same way that using a rug on a hard surface can divide a large room into sections, this rule holds true for rugs on carpet as well.

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• Don’t get artistic. Carpet isn’t where you want to make a statement. Stay away from wild colors or designs and leave that for complementary rugs, artwork, or showpiece furniture. Carpeting takes up the entire floor of a room, and choosing a high contrast color or wild design can be shocking rather than complementing. A rug or other colorful element is better set for the statement that you might be looking to create.

• Change colors in every room. Find a neutral color that works for your entire house and stick with it. Don’t choose different carpet for every room where you plan to have it installed. There is no need to make one room different from another by changing carpet colors. 

• Don’t carpet where you eat. While most carpets these days come with stain resistance, that still doesn’t make them a good choice for places like the kitchen where you are constantly preparing and eating food. You don’t want to worry every time that you spill, and you don’t want to spend every waking moment vacuuming crumbs.

Tile Flooring

Tile is a great choice for many rooms of the home and is just as popular as ever. Of course, with tile there is a great variety of design and style, so it’s important to choose the right options for your home, understanding where it is and isn’t ideal to use in place of a wood or carpet flooring.

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• Coordinate your grout color. Don’t go crazy with grout. Using grout color that matches your tiles will stand the test of time. While contrasting your grout with the tile can look spectacular, it’s a big risk and you won’t want to regrout your tile after a few years because the concept looks outdated or too extravagant.
• Simple and elegant always works. Tile isn’t cheap, so you want to choose pieces that will stand the test of time. It’s easy to get distracted when flipping through a tile book. Your mind might start racing towards all of the crazy ideas that can become a reality with unique, artistic tiles, but like with any other flooring, sticking with simple colors and shapes can keep your home looking clean and modern, allowing you to spice it up with other, less permanent elements.
• Get bold! This might seem a bit counterintuitive to what we just said about keeping things simple and elegant, but bold tiles do have their time and place. Small spaces, like a powder room or a backsplash, are ideal locations to get a little crazy with your tile choices. You can make these small spaces really stand out as an exciting element of your new home by choosing fun tiles. Plus, if you only use the tiles in a small area, it won’t be the end of the world should you choose to change them up five years down the line.
• Larger the space, larger the tile. If you’re considering tile for a larger room – perhaps an entryway – consider using large tile formats. The long linear lines will make the room appear even bigger and more enticing.

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• Don’t switch tiles within a room. Choose a tile that makes your owner’s bathroom standout as a place you’d want to spend time relaxing, and perhaps put something a bit exciting in the powder room. Don’t mix and match within the same room. The contrast can be quite jarring.
• Grout can disappear. While it might seem like a fun trend, grout doesn’t need to accent your tile. It’s often best if the grout simply disappears into the design, allowing the tile that you’ve chosen to take the spotlight.
• Eliminate the borders. Tile borders, inlays, and accents might look great on day one of the install, but after some time you may get tired of the look. This trend is a bit older, and modern homes, which tend to be more sleek and serene, look great without this extra, busy, look.
• Don’t use polished tile on the floor. While it might look snazzy, polished tile will provide a high risk of slipping, which is the last thing you need if you have kids racing around the house or elderly family members visiting for dinner.

Flooring Transitions

Once you’ve decided upon the flooring that you want in different spaces of your home, you’ll need to consider how they all fit together. It would be a true shame to pick out several fantastic options only to realize that they are completely incompatible when placed together in the same household.

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• Set it and forget it. For your main space, particularly in an open floor plan concept, stick with just a single type of flooring and use it throughout the entire area. This will keep the space looking fluid and open.
• Examine the undertones. If you’re mixing flooring throughout your home, you’ll want to be sure that the undertones match. If you find wood, tile, or carpet with similar undertones, everything should blend together nicely, not feeling abrupt or out of place.
• Rule of Two. You might find a dozen different flooring options that pique your interest, but we recommend narrowing that down to two and sticking with those. Adding additional flooring options can feel disruptive and unplanned.
• Transfer between rooms. The best place to transition between one flooring to another is from room to room, particularly if there is a doorway which creates a natural breaking point.

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• If you like it, stick with it. There is absolutely no need to change flooring from room to room. We often work with homeowners who feel the urge to pick a different flooring for every room of their home, but there is absolutely no need to do this. Your home will look best if you create one consistent look that travels from room to room.
• Avoid contrast. It can look startling if you switch from a dark wood to a bright white tile. Try to stick with shades that meld into one another rather than creating a distinct transition.
• Don’t try to match color. More often than not, if you try to match color exactly – i.e a light brown carpet with a light brown wood – it ends up looking like a mistake. You’ll never match color exactly, so it’s best to choose colors that work together, but don’t look like they are trying to be one another.

Conclusion

There are a lot of options when it comes to flooring, and it’s important to choose the colors and styles that work best for you and your home. Work with the Schumacher Homes experts to best understand what flooring compliments each other and what might be best in your particular home.