What Flooring Is Best For Living Rooms?

Living rooms are one of the rooms where you can be the most flexible with your flooring choice. Unlike bathrooms or kitchens which can be limited due to the increased risk of splashing, living rooms are not expected to have big volumes of foot traffic, lots of splashing, or wear and tear. This of course depends upon an individual's circumstances, and would change if they maybe have a lot of pets, or a large family. But generally there are many flooring options available for living rooms.

For a long time, carpets were traditionally the standard choice for living rooms, but in recent times hard surface flooring has made a resurgence and is now a top choice for living room floors. Hard surface floors carry many merits over carpets because they are easier to maintain, don’t trap dust and allergens, odours don’t stick to them, and they often look (or are) like more natural products.

Requirements for a Living Room Floor

A living room floor should be aesthetically appealing to the eye, indeed, it is the floor that can draw the most attention at first glance if it is a high-quality product. Hardwearing flooring options will be generally better suited to living rooms, as it is one of the main rooms of the house where guests are hosted, as well as the room where the family is likely to pass through daily. With all of this foot traffic, the floor is bound to have some wear and tear over time, so it is better to invest in a harder wearing floor to stand up to it. 

Hard surface floors include:

• Real Wood Flooring

• Laminate Flooring

• Luxury Vinyl Tile Flooring (LVT)

• Parquet Flooring

Real Wood

Real wood flooring is a natural, high quality product. Due to the nature of its manufacture and sourcing the materials, it tends to be the most expensive of the listed hardwood flooring solutions. But if you have the budget, it is well worth investing in a real wood floor. Not only can they potentially increase the value of a home, they are also the most environmentally friendly flooring solution. Fully natural and recyclable.

Real wood flooring can come in the form of solid or engineered wood. There are differences, but both are natural products and can go into a living room. Solid wood flooring mainly has a longer life span due to the thickness of the hardwood (oak, ash, walnut, etc) all the way through the board.

Engineered wood can be great with underfloor heating because the wood actually holds and radiates the heat, saving you energy and giving you a warm floor underfoot. Due to its manufacture and the softer plywood core, it is less likely to move around as it naturally expands with temperature fluctuations.

However, with these floors being such high quality products, they do require maintenance to keep them in top shape. Regular cleaning, and if any spots get damaged, then they can be sanded and refinished. It can be done by yourself or with the services of a professional.

Laminate Flooring

If you don’t have the big budget required for a real wood floor, or perhaps you don’t want to have to maintain it all the time, but still want the warm aesthetic that real wood brings, then laminate flooring is the perfect solution! 

These are suitable for busier households where a wood floor would be liable to get scratched. Spills and dirt can be easily cleaned, and you never need to refinish a laminate floor. Our laminate floors all come with click systems, making them easy to install. This saves you money on fitting costs because you can install the floor yourself or the fitting costs will be cheaper than an older style tongue and groove floor.

These durable floors can be manufactured with all the knots and grooves of a real wood floor, using rich colour textures to create an indistinguishable look from real wood.

LVT Flooring

LVT flooring, or vinyl flooring, as some call it, is another hard surface alternative to real wood flooring. Vinyl floors come in various types, the main two being standard LVT, which is made from resin polymers, and SPC, stone-plastic-composite (also known as rigid core vinyl). 

Both function the same, while the products are a little different. Our Aquacore range of vinyl floors is SPC, which means the board is made out of stone and resin. This creates a thin, but still very durable board as the strength of the stone helps it stand up to foot traffic. Another merit of SPC over standard LVT is that it will not warp or move under excessive UV exposure, since it is stone. Nothing will move it.

The best benefit vinyl floors carry over real wood and laminate is that they are 100% waterproof. These are the standard options of what would go in a bathroom or a kitchen for safety, as the water will not affect the floor at all. But vinyl flooring can be put in any room in the house, and it is not as expensive as real wood flooring.

Our rigid core vinyls come in wood effect. Using ultra high resolution images and intelligent manufacture, our boards look and feel almost identical to real wood.

Parquet Flooring

Patterned flooring is a timeless, luxury product. Parquet flooring is not a material, but a style that can come in all of the materials listed above. This flooring option has more merits purely on its look and the aesthetic it adds to a room rather than any practical benefit. Parquet floors usually come in the common herringbone and chevron patterns, two patterns that have held their popularity for centuries, and for good reason. Both patterns are beautiful, and can give the illusion of a wider space, on top of adding a luxury layer to the room.

Parquet floors can come in real engineered wood, vinyl, or laminate. We do have a patterned engineered oak range, and our Aquacore range of vinyl floors features several herringbone colours.

Engineered oak Chevron Floor from our Patterned Oak Flooring Range