Following on from part one, here are a few more practical ways to make sure your wood flooring and the rest of your interior design actually work together, rather than fighting each other once everything's finished.
Choose your floor's colour before the wall paint
This is worth doing in this order for a genuinely practical reason: repainting a wall is far cheaper and easier than changing a wood floor's colour once it's fitted. Wood stain and finish options are also considerably more limited than the near-infinite range of wall paint colours available, so it makes sense to lock in the floor first and build everything else, walls included, around it rather than the other way round. Decide on your general direction, warm or cool undertones, light or dark, before committing to anything else in the room's colour scheme.
Choose wider planks
Wide plank flooring has stayed one of the most consistently requested looks in wood flooring for good reason, and it's likely to remain popular for a long time yet, not just a passing trend. A few genuine benefits:
- Fewer seams across the floor make a room feel calmer and less visually busy, since there's less breaking up the surface than with narrower boards
- The way light plays across wider boards tends to make a space feel more open and decluttered
- Fewer individual boards across the same floor area means less to visually track, which reads as simpler and cleaner overall
It's worth being accurate about one claim that sometimes gets attached to wide planks: the width itself doesn't make the floor structurally sturdier. If anything, wider boards can show slightly more visible movement per board during humidity changes, simply because each one covers more surface area. The genuine benefits of wide plank are aesthetic, the open, spacious feel and fewer seams, not an inherent structural advantage. Our guide to current oak parquet flooring trends covers wide plank sizing in more detail if you're considering it.
Deciding what style genuinely suits you
There's no universally right answer here, only what you'll actually be happy living with. A few characteristics worth knowing as you narrow things down:
- Domestic species like oak, ash and walnut tend to show more natural colour and grain variation between boards, giving a livelier, more rustic look
- Some exotic species show less variation board to board, though this depends on the specific species rather than being a blanket rule, so it's worth checking actual samples rather than assuming
- A lower grade, with more visible knots and colour variation, isn't a lower-quality floor. It's simply a different aesthetic, often a more characterful, less uniform one, at a genuinely lower price point
- Tighter-grained species can be trickier to stain evenly, sometimes resulting in a blotchy finish, which is worth discussing with your fitter before committing to a specific stain colour on a species you're unfamiliar with
If you'd like help pulling all of this together for your own project, species, grade, plank width and colour - our parquet floor fitting team can talk it through with you. Our guide to how wood floor colour changes the mood of a room is also worth a read if you're still deciding on tone. Get in touch for a free quote whenever you're ready.
Frequently asked questions
How much more limited am I on floor colours compared with wall paint? Considerably, since wood stains and finishes come in a defined, more limited range compared with the essentially unlimited palette available in paint. This is exactly why choosing the floor colour first and building the room's palette around it tends to work better than the reverse.
Does a lower-grade wood floor wear out faster than a premium grade? Not necessarily. Grade mostly reflects appearance, knots, colour variation and visible character, rather than the wood's underlying hardness or durability, which comes down to species and construction instead.
Is it true that wide planks are more expensive than narrower ones? Generally yes, since wider boards use more material per plank and need a flatter, more carefully prepared subfloor. The look is popular enough that many people consider it worth the extra cost regardless.
Why do some wood species stain unevenly while others don't? It largely comes down to grain and pore structure. Tighter-grained species can absorb stain unevenly, leading to a blotchy result, while more open-grained species like oak generally take stain more predictably and evenly.
Should I choose my floor's stain colour or the wood's natural tone first? For most species, it's worth deciding whether you want the natural tone or a stained colour before anything else, since that choice affects which species and grades genuinely suit your plan. A natural tone lets the wood's own character lead, while a stain gives you more control over the exact colour regardless of species.
