Choosing The Perfect Flooring For Your New Kitchen

Choosing The Perfect Flooring For Your New Kitchen

You’ve chosen a design for your new kitchen – picked out the units, worktops and appliances – but have you remembered to think about the flooring?

The choices can seem endless: tiles, vinyl, laminate, wood and stone…

What about colour?

Will it be matching, complementary or contrasting?

Let’s start with colour…

Some of our customers like to opt for a contrast between kitchen worktops and their chosen flooring – this is often seen as the most deign orientated selection.

If you were to take the opposite route and choose to coordinate your kitchen flooring and worktops, you should opt for materials that come in the same finish for example matt/gloss.

Of course, when you’re trying to match, you need to make sure you can get flooring that does actually match. So, depending on the colour you’ve chosen, this might not be an option.

Now onto materials….

Laminate

The popularity of laminate flooring has soared in recent years. And this is particularly true for kitchens.  Because of its durability, it is very suited to kitchens. Laminate flooring can also come with antimicrobial and antistatic properties – another advantage for kitchens, especially for people with children.

Finally, because of its versatility, laminate flooring is available in a large variety of colours, making it easier to find the finish you want to best compliment your kitchen.

Stone Flooring

Like laminate flooring, stone floor tiles come in a massive variety of colours and textures. So you there are countless ways you can use stone to compliment your kitchen units.

Some people are put off using stone because stone is porous; resulting in some wear and tear. But, don’t let that put you off as there are very effective sealants available, which once applied to floor it should be effortless to maintain.

Vinyl

Vinyl sheet flooring is easy to fit and there are some great designs including wood and tile effect.

When going down the vinyl route, you need to pay attention to the thickness of the “wear layer”. The thicker it is, the harder wearing the flooring will be.

Ceramic Tiles

Ceramic tiles have their advantages. You’ve a wide choice of colours, you can create different effects with coloured grouts, and you can lay them either square or diagonal.

There is a couple of big downside, though, there is a tendency for them to chip if a heavy object hits them and they can be a bit cold if you are walking around in your bare feet. Nevertheless, they are a still a very popular and hard-wearing option.

Amtico and Karndean.

These are available as plank strips or square tiles in a range of tile and wood.

Of the two main suppliers, Amtico is a little more colour fast than Karndean, important if you have a very sunny open space. They do run similar designs but there are variations in texture and colours. Both also have “feature strips” enabling you to create a very unique design.

A newish supplier to this market is Harvey Maria. They too supply the more usual woods and tile effects, but also supply some on trend stripes and other feature designs.

Summary

This should have given you some ideas of both the flooring options available and the main pros and cons of each one.

It’s just a case of thinking about the aesthetic look of the materials and how they’ll stand up to the wear-and-tear of your everyday kitchen life.

Hope it helps

Tommy