Rita Notes: How to choose hard Flooring
Rita Konig gives advice on choosing the right hard flooring, from wood to stone and porcelain
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Flooring is unusual in terms of the elements of a house. It is part of the interior __design to an extent, but also very much part of the architecture, and something you will not want to change once it has been installed. So it needs to be at one with the building and fit with the way you want to decorate your house. For me, f looring should fall into the background - it is vital to get it right or it will shout at you every time you come into the room.
In my own flat, I put the most expensive flooring in my laundry room and kitchen - Popham __design tiles in the former and oak boards in the latter. I have regretted neither. The Popham tiles are exactly what was needed in my basement to perk up an otherwise dank space. For the rest of the flat I (so cleverly, as I thought at the time) economised by putting down pine boards and then painting them. I have since had to replace them as they moved, cracked and became a total mess quite quickly. Under-floor heating might have had something to do with this, but the lesson is that it is always worth doing things properly at the outset. A shabby floor lets everything else down - rather like scuffed shoes.
Wide oak boards are hard to beat. I have been working with Freeman Attwood quite a bit
recently. Its boards are left to dry for three years before they are laid, which means
they have minimal movement once installed and can be laid on underfloor heating.
This is interesting, as many architects are more comfortable recommending engineered boards over solid oak to ensure they will not move, which seems a terrible shame to me. One of the joys of oak is that there is not that endless choice of colour. I was working with a client recently who was getting in knots about her floor - whether it should be greyer or whiter and a general panic that it definitely should not be orange. I introduced her to Freeman Attwood and immediately we were all set. There is also now no need to have orange floors, as clear Osmo oil means that we can have beautiful and raw-looking boards without needing to use shellac varnish to protect them.
When there is a lot of wood flooring in a house, I like to paint chequerboard floors in some of the smaller rooms. I have done this in bathrooms off bedrooms with wooden floors - I have a white check painted and leavetheotherinthenaturalwood.Itworksverywell,especially if you make the checks quite large (about 45cm square). It breaks up the monotony of the wood, but does not mean totally painting over the oak floor. Bunny Mellon used to paint her wooden floors a lot and to great effect; it is worth looking them up on Pinterest if you like the idea and need some inspiration.
Recently, I saw a very smart take on a wooden floor by Spencer Fung (the architect behind the Daylesford shops). He had been working on a white cement floor in planks and imprinting them with wood to give the grain effect. His recent book, Architecture by Hand: Inspired by Nature (Clearview, £35), is an excellent reference for natural materials and is full of clever ideas and inspiration.
Stone is something that I veered away from until quite recently. Lapicida covers a lot of ground in stone flooring. I love the 'Nero Parquet' limestone, a black herringbone floor, which is unusual and so smart. While it is definitely at the higher end of the market, it does some excellent alternatives to its most swanky stones. As well as ravishing reclaimed stone floors, it offers some excellent porcelain stone and wood-effect tiles. When I first saw porcelain tiles a few years ago, they were not good enough. In the intervening years, this product has come a long way and the difference in cost to stone is enormous. I have just specified Lapicida's 'Highland Heather' porcelain tile; the reclaimed stone blew the budget and the new stone that is tumbled to look old was not a patch on the porcelain.
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