Open-plan spaces don’t always have to focus on a single design aesthetic. While you want to create a nice flow throughout the space, there are ways to add dimension through the creation of different zones. Applying creative lighting techniques, different types of flooring and half-walls are ways that interior designers accomplish this throughout the home.
If you have a large, open space that seems just a bit too uniform for your tastes, creating zones with different types of flooring is a great way to shake things up and add some interest. With a little thought and consideration, you could turn your home from dull to delightful, using different textures and patterns of flooring to either highlight and delineate certain areas or help them flow into each other in gradations.
Some Ideas For Flooring Zones
Creating flooring zones is about separating areas of a large open space. It allows you to demarcate your cooking area, dining area, entryways, and living space. It helps to show where one area begins and another ends, encouraging people to see each zone as a different room with a completely different function and feel. You see this type of treatment often in commercial spaces, retail stores, and restaurants, but it is becoming more popular in home interior design as well.
Here are some tips for creating zones with different flooring:
Darker tile, stone or hardwood for the dining area creates a dramatic effect, contrasting a bright white porcelain tile or laminate in the kitchen.
The elegance of limestone can be used in the living area to create a more formal and sophisticated look while a children’s play area can be highlighted with patterned or colorful laminate or encaustic tile. This is a design idea you often see in bathrooms, where a mosaic might be applied to the shower area and a larger ceramic tile placed throughout the rest of the room.
1. Take some time to plan it out
Creating zones is not something you can just throw together. Keep in mind that it’s not like adding a rug that you can change up at any time – it’s a permanent addition to the floor design, so it’s an important thing to consider as you’ll have to live with it for a while. Ultimately, the styles you choose should match the design intent of the rest of the house.
You will typically be separating the cooking area and the dining area from the living room, and you may also need to think about entryways if the open space is what you walk into from the front or rear door.
2. Don’t have too many things going on at once
From a flooring perspective, you should be careful not to have too many contrasting things going on. For instance, you don’t want to walk into the space and see several contrasting and busy-looking patterns in close proximity as it will wear on the senses and make the room look choppy and disorganized. Choose complimentary but contrasting colors and think about using texture to create gentle gradations.
Shoot for achieving a level of consistency by looking at the entire room from a common vantage point. How many areas can you see?
3. Types of flooring to consider
In a typical open design space, there will likely be a lot of tile and a lot of composite to consider. Be sure you are erring on the side of practicality, because you don’t want to choose something that is going to be difficult to clean, especially in high-traffic areas.
Rugs can also be used, and they are an excellent place to start if you don’t quite have ideas you can commit to right away. That way, you can experiment a little with a couple of design ideas before making a more permanent decision.
4. For bars and basement recreation rooms
If you have a basement bar area or media room, you may want to delineate the bar area from the bathroom entry to focus the eye on the room’s feature (the bar) and take the focus away from the bathroom, which should not be the first thing you notice when you walk into the room.
Think about where do you want your bar area to stop. Do you want to delineate the bar area from the card table or pool table? Or, do you have a seating area for media viewing and gaming? These areas can be separated from each other using contrasting colors of tile or flooring.
These are just a few ideas to get you thinking about creating flooring zones in your open-plan home. Reach out today to learn more. We’d love to talk to you about how we can help.
