Fabulous Floors

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Prepared to be floored! Today in our home gallery series, we turn our attention to fabulous flooring?

Flooring is one of the most expensive items and choosing it one of the most stressful decisions you’ll make when decorating your house. Not only do floor surfaces have to be beautiful, they also have to score high on comfort, safety, durability and maintenance. If you’re in the market for a fabulous new material to place underfoot, we’ve rounded up a selection of the best floor finishes from our house tours just to get you started?

Hard Floors | Bare, hard floors are gaining popularity in residential premises as they provide a low-cost yet highly durable flooring surface, very suitable to the sparse, modern Scandinavian design en vogue at the moment.

Concrete: The epitome of?cutting-edge design, it can be used as part of a scheme in most design styles and is the most hypoallergenic of all floor materials.

Go for glorious polished concrete floors, as in the Cork new-build featured in our September/October issue (above left) or?matte concrete in one of our most popular house tours – a modernised surf cottage in Sligo (above right).

Marble: One of the most elegant flooring options, its classic and timeless simplicity is a fantastic canvas for showcasing your furniture and interior choices.

Polished natural white marble in a Blackrock new-build, home of the 2014 IMAGE Best Interiors Blog winner?(above left) and?manmade marble tiles in a muted sand tone.

Stone: Extremely durable, it comes in a variety of colours and patterns that will make matching it to your furniture and interiors easy.

Granite, as seen above in this cool countryside retreat, is not just for worktops and kitchen islands.

Tiles: A staple of many interiors styles, and seen in most kitchens, bathrooms and hallways.

Three of our favourite tiling patterns from our house tours come from:?this elegant London terrace, this?modernised Victorian gem and one?sophisticated Ranelagh home.

Wooden Floors | Adored by most of us, they come in a wide range of colours, finishes and styles. We pick our favourite ones here…

Floorboards: traditional or modern, matte or glossy, natural or engineered? There’s a world of choice.

Our top three floorboard finishes from our house tours (if we have to choose) are: these sleek, Scandinavian-style light long oak floorboards, grey-painted floors and these traditional mahogany-stain ones.

Wide planks: the wider and longer, the better, as they create seamless depth and length in any room.

We like them as seen in this cool London pad and the modern countryside retreat/kids’ heaven above.

Soft Floor Foverings | With carpets, mats and rugs, not only do you get some warmth, but you can also make a statement with personally appealing patterns.

Which style are you: modern, shaggy, animal?

Can’t decide which type of floor you like most? Play with diverse patterns and finishes to create a multi-textured, multi-coloured floor space, as in this modernised mews in London’s Hackney.

Read about the perfect floor and more in our September/October issue flooring feature, and tell us which floor type you are going for on our Facebook and?Twitter.

Image_Interiors /?@DianaNacu