How to use dark wooden flooring to brighten up your home

It sounds counter intuitive, but dark wooden flooring really can make room brighter. The contrast between a dark, mysterious floor and perhaps a suite of furniture in lighter colours is an attractive and striking one. It adds an air of luxury, and a veneer of grandeur. It also hides stains – and isn’t always as expensive as one might imagine.

Dark wooden flooring comes in three main types; strip, plank and parquet. The first two types are similar (plank flooring consists of panels of varying widths), while the heavily patterned parquet can look amazing providing the angles of the room furnishings do not create an overbearing effect.

The wood in a wooden flooring could be solid or reclaimed, and/or engineered – click here to find out more about this eco-friendly style. There’s also the option of vinyl or laminate and these can sometimes be an attractive and far cheaper option, although as Ideal Home points out they can also appear flat and lifeless and suffer chipping at the edges. That’s something you really don’t want because the purpose and reason a dark floor ‘works’ is that it can bring out the brightness of the rest of the room, rather than distracting from it.

Sometimes it makes little aesthetic sense to place it under a set of dark furniture, or black bookcases. However, with a lighter carpet in a ‘halved’ room, you can then place darker furniture on this to create a less monotonous, more textured room. Sometimes a strong rug in rich shades, perhaps in the Moroccan/African style, can bring out the best in the floor, but be careful not to make the room look too busy and boisterous.

Houzz recommends wood furniture that: ‘matches the warmth of your floors but is a few shades lighter. For instance, pair grayish or black wood floors with pale, weathered woods, and pair warm, rich floors with warm medium- to light-toned woods like cherry or maple.’

Another strategy is to pair the furniture legs to the floor shade, with the seats table or furnishings of a different colour. For this to work the walls need to be quite light to prevent a feeling of enclosure, unless this is an effect that you want to create.

A mix of woods – light, dark, brown grey and green – perched on a dark wood floor can create a forest or even jungle-type effect, to be complemented by candles and intelligent lighting. White walls and dark floor work beautifully together, but adding a third colour such as a soft pink, green or blue, with very little of any other hue, provides an interesting and vibrant tone to a room.

There are many other ways of presenting a dark wood floor, but in reality once the floor is laid the hard work is done already. Providing there are not too many jarring colours and the room retains light and vibrancy, your room cannot fail to impress.

cover via Ideal Home / main via Cote de Texas

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