7 Best Hardwood Flooring Ideas for Your Living Room

7 Best Hardwood Flooring Ideas for Your Living Room

Whether you live in a large house, duplex or tiny apartment, the living room is the centre stage of your home as it’s the perfect place to gather, relax and entertain.

And the sky’s the limit when it comes to decorating your dream living room. With so many flooring designs and decor ideas available today, creating your ideal living space is as simple as searching Google. From classic wooden planks to two-tone patterns and gorgeous chevron planks, let these unique wooden flooring trends inspire your next living room renovation project.

7 Unique Hardwood Flooring Ideas for Your Living Room

Hardwood adds beauty, class and character to your home. It also increases its resale value and lasts for decades when well cared for.

Here are some of the top hardwood flooring ideas to upgrade your living room.

1. Parquet Tiles

If you love retro designs, parquet tiles are the best way to incorporate them into your interior decor. They feature repeated geometric patterns – for example, checkerboards and rounded triangles – within the checkerboard squares. What’s more, you have a range of patterns to choose from.

Parquet hardwood design adds a touch of sophistication and pairs perfectly with all types of decor, particularly vintage and antique styles. Traditional parquet floor installation is, however, costly. Readymade parquet planks laid out in a wood veneer are a more affordable alternative.

2. Painted Hardwood

Whether you have solid wood or engineered hardwood flooring, painting your wooden floors is a cost-effective way to give your room a new look.

From neutrals and bright tones to pitch black, you can choose almost any colour to paint your wooden floors. If you’re working with your existing floorboards, sanding is an essential process to remove the finish and create a smooth surface. This will ensure that your floor absorbs all the paint and hides any marks, holes or patchy stains. However, if you’re working with new, high-quality floorboards, you probably won’t need to sand them. An experienced hardwood flooring professional can guide you through the painting dos and don’ts.

3. Mix and Match Tones

Think mismatched hardwood floors don’t look good? Think again.

While choosing the same flooring tone for the entire room gives it a spacious look, it’s not necessarily the only way to lay your hardwood floor. You can always experiment with different shades of wood to create a unique, eye-catching look.

Dark hardwood floors made from mahogany or Brazilian walnut give your room a cozy, intimate feel; lighter varieties like ash, maple and white oak reflect natural light and make the space more spacious. Mixing different hardwood flooring tones in a single area creates an assorted, layered look that provides the right amount of depth and detail. When transitioning between colours, make sure they’re distinct so the mismatch looks intentional.

4. Reclaimed Wood

Reclaimed wood refers to wood recycled from older structures for use in today’s eco-friendly homes and workplaces. It differs from salvaged wood that’s been cut and stocked for many years but not used in any type of construction. Wood over 100 years old has a tight grain, which makes it a perfect flooring option for high foot-traffic areas like living rooms, kitchens and hallways. Reclaimed wood flooring creates a worn, rustic look, which adds a sense of warmth and richness to your room.

5. Distressed Effect

If you want something completely out of the box, distressed hardwood floors are just what you’ve been looking for. Rich bold, and beautiful, distressed-look flooring is popular among today’s homeowners and interior designers. Here, the hardwood undergoes certain procedures, like aging, sculpting, wire brushing or hand-scraping, to give it an antique, reclaimed effect. Distressed floors come in a range of wood species, tones, colours, character and grain patterns. So, whether you want rustic hardwood flooring to match your antique-style cabinet or bring a weathered feel to an otherwise modern interior, distressed flooring can meet your needs.

6. Blanched Wood

Blanched wooden floors are very popular, with interior design magazines featuring them in different settings, from country cottages to loft apartments.

To give wood a blanched effect, it undergoes a bleaching process, where a chemical solution is poured onto its surface. This gives your floor a grayish look, with barely any grain visible. An ideal backdrop for cozy, informal settings, blanched hardwood floors can be installed anywhere in your home. Unlike solid hardwood, engineered hardwood flooring expands and contracts very little with temperature and moisture changes, making it an ideal choice for the chemical process.

7. Ebonized hardwood

Unlike paints and stains that mostly stay on the surface of the wood (or soak into its pores), ebonizing is a chemical reaction that turns it black. The process involves iron acetate reacting with the wood to change its original colour. Each hardwood floor reacts differently to the process, depending on the species, the ratio of iron to acetic acid in the solution and other factors. This means that two wooden floors of the same type will look different after undergoing the same ebonizing process. The effects of ebonizing are similar to that of wood’s natural aging process. So, if you want your new or existing hardwood floor to have a rustic look, ebonized wood is the perfect choice.

These are some of the most unique and trending hardwood flooring ideas for your living room. If you like any of them or feel inspired to do something with your own twist, AA FLOORS & MORE LTD. is here to help. We are your local flooring experts, specializing in all types of hardwood flooring services.  Ask for a free quote.