The living room is where the whole family gathers. Meals are shared, as are memories, and guests are directed in. It’s a shared space and the public face of your home, so you’ll want it to look its best.

If you’ve recently decided to refurb your living room, or you’ve moved into a new home and are thinking of doing up the place, what flooring you go with will inform the rest of your decorating decisions. But what style should you go with? Do you want parquet style floors for a traditional option that’s making a revival today, or will you go for mixed-width flooring for a unique and more natural look to your flooring?

Whatever your taste, you’ll find an option here. Read our guide to all the wood flooring styles to see if you gain any inspiration.

Classic parquet

Once considered old-fashioned, parquet flooring is coming back in a big way. Showing up in homes around the globe real wood parquet floors, instantly giving drab rooms a chic upgrade. Like the exposed brickwork before it, it featured heavily in trendy bars and restaurants and was an idea that ended up going home with the customers.

The parquet style features individual floorboards that are arranged into sharp geometric shapes. They go well with the resurgence of art deco touches that have been coming back over the past few years, but they can also fit nicely into any interior design style for a look that will add a little something extra to an average wooden floor.

The main perk is that it can be done with most forms of wood. You can go for the easy-click flooring that comes with laminate and DIY your flooring or pay a professional to put down solid flooring for a luxury option or add it to a bathroom with water-resistant LVT.

Mix it up

If you like your flooring to look a little more natural, like you just got back from chopping wood and decided to put some down, you’ll love the mixed-width laminate style. This style sees boards of various widths of laminate flooring laid down on your floor for a look that evokes the imperfection of nature. Rather than going for uniform boards, your home will be given a boho-chic upgrade with different sizes of board decorating your floors.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. You can also go for different colours to really enforce the natural, cosy feeling of a rustic home. This style of various colours lends itself well to solid wood flooring, which can come with batches of variations in colours, and is very durable and long-lasting.

Feeling distressed?

The distressed style is made for today’s eco-aware interior designer. All those recycled, upcycled and refurbed pieces of furniture you’ve seen online will go amazingly with a distressed floor.

Made by bashing, scraping, tumbling, staining and other methods we were all taught not to do to a floor, distressed floors are the style that sees the beauty in the imperfect.

The biggest perk here is that any scratches or stains will perfectly blend into the floor, depending on how distressed you want it, making it pet and child-friendly, but there is also the fact that you will spend less on a distressed floor versus a reclaimed floor, and there is more available stock.

Going grey

Grey is becoming the neutral of choice for so many refurbished homes. Those with an addiction to colour needn’t clutch your pearls. Grey flooring allows for a stylish backdrop for any colour palette, allowing for a cool-toned base for any decoration in a home. Whether you’re going for something light and silvery, or you would rather make a statement with a bold darker wood, grey goes with new and existing furniture.

Grey flooring evokes sophistication, making for a home that looks instantly like an LA mansion with grey flooring. You can mix cool pastels in your living room for a modern look with dusky blues and blush pinks or mix ashen and distressed colours with other colours of nature like browns and greens to warm up a room.

www.woodfloorwarehouse.co.uk