How Wide or Narrow Wood Flooring Will Affect Your Décor

Throughout our lives, we’ve had experiences that influence the way we react to things that we see. When it comes to interior design or décor, the way we perceive things depends on what we’re used to seeing and in which setting. For example, until recently, a distressed, aged floor would have been considered neglected and in need of repair. Today, this look is highly sought after and both artificially aged and reclaimed flooring are in high demand.

Throughout our lives, we’ve had experiences that influence the way we react to things that we see. When it comes to interior design or décor, the way we perceive things depends on what we’re used to seeing and in which setting. For example, until recently, a distressed, aged floor would have been considered neglected and in need of repair. Today, this look is highly sought after and both artificially aged and reclaimed flooring are in high demand.

Narrow vs Wide Wood Flooring

When it comes to wide and narrow flooring, we tend to categorise these according to our life experiences. In the same way that we associate hats on women with weddings, we associate highly polished, narrow board wood flooring with a more formal setting.  What’s more, in the same way that vertical stripes have a tendency to make ‘chunky’ people look thinner and horizontal stripes tend to make everyone look ‘chunkier’, wood flooring will affect the apparent dimensions of your room.

There’s no escaping the fact that we associate narrow flooring more with formality than casual settings, but this needn’t be the case. If you have a valuable, highly polished dining table for example and you want it to retain a formal and distinguished look, choosing highly polished, narrow wooden floor boards will give an overall look of class and charm. On the other hand, if you want the backdrop to your table to be more relaxed, then a wide board, distressed finish wood floor will help you achieve this feel. So, as a general rule, if you assume narrow boards to look more formal and wide boards to look more casual you won’t go far wrong.

Flooring and your home décor

The other thing that wide and narrow flooring will do to your décor is that it will appear to change the shape and, or dimensions of a room. If you’d like to change the apparent dimensions or shape of your room, here are some ideas for you: 

1. Small rooms: If you have a small room, wide boards will give an impression of greater volume to your room, particularly if the boards are light coloured.
2. Large rooms: In large rooms you can normally get away with either narrow or wide wood floor boards. Ironically, while wide boards will make a small room look bigger, they can also make a big room appear smaller. In larger rooms, where you want the room to seem more proportioned, it is a clever trick to mix wide and narrow boards to create an illusion of bringing in the walls. For example, in a rectangular room, you could create a rectangle of either wide or narrow boards in the middle of your room where the sides run parallel to the walls. Thereafter, you could place a border of the opposite type of board around the outside. That’s to say, if you’ve created a central rectangle with narrow boards, you could create the border with the wide boards, or vice versa. Cutting your room up in this way will cleverly reduce the impression of volume and add interest to your décor at the same time.
3. Narrow rooms: A clever way to make narrow rooms appear to be wider is to use wide boards that are laid perpendicular (at right angles) to the long side of your room.  The effect of this will be that your room will appear wider immediately.
4. Long rooms: In the same way that wide boards laid perpendicular to the long side of narrow rooms will make the room seem wider, wide boards laid perpendicular to the long side of long rooms will make them seem shorter.

While all of these effects are only visual illusions, the right choice of board can make a huge difference to the look of both your décor and your room size or dimension. Having said that, with an immense choice of boards available today, making the right choice for your project can seem overwhelming.  

If you have any further questions regarding wood flooring or you are looking for an advice about the best flooring options for your home feel free to contact the ESB sales team. Contact us now to request your no hassle no obligation free samples or come down to our North London showroom for a closer look.

Pictures: Pinterest