The beauty of light-colored hardwood floors
Light-colored hardwood floors can bring a sense of spacious elegance to any room. With the ability to match virtually any interior design scheme, light hardwood colors are especially ideal for contemporary wood floors. A variety of wood species come in naturally light colors – Maple and Oak hardwood floor colors are among the most popular, but Ash and Hickory are also excellent options.
At Carlisle Wide Plank Floors, we help customers choose the perfect light-colored hardwood floors for their interiors. We not only offer a wide range of floors made from hardwood, pine and reclaimed timbers, but a virtually unlimited variety of stain colors that can help you achieve a very specific look for your light-colored floors.
What are light-colored hardwood floors?
Light-colored hardwood floors are a flooring surface made from hardwood timbers that are either naturally light in appearance or that have been finished with a light-colored stain.
What are the advantages of light-colored hardwood floors?
Light wood floors create a greater sense of space within a room and can help to brighten up darker rooms. They also typically have a neutral color palette that can easily accommodate a wide variety of interior designs. Additionally, light-colored hardwood floors hide dust, dirt and debris more easily than dark floors.
What are the disadvantages of hardwood floors with a light color?
Depending how light you want your floors to be, they may require multiple coats of stain, paint and custom sealer to obscure the natural color of the wood. Depending on the other colors within the room, light hardwood floors can potentially seem to wash out a room.
Do prefinished floors come in light colors?
Prefinished floors from Carlisle come in a virtually unlimited variety of hardwood floor colors, thanks to our endless options for stain color and finish. A prefinished floor also enables you to avoid the mess and the odor that usually accompany a floor which is sanded, stained and finished after installation.
Wood species and stains for light-colored hardwood floors
Choosing the wood
When considering light-colored hardwood floors, the first choice is which species of hardwood is most to your liking. There are several common hardwoods that are naturally light in color.
- Red Oak is a lighter wood that has salmon undertones in the heartwood.
- White Oak is a light, nutty brown wood with dramatic brain features.
- White Maple features lighter hues that are perfect for a more neutral floor color.
- Birch features blonde outer edges and warm amber portions with rich reddish-brown tones in the heartwood.
- Ash floors come in colors that range from cream to light blonde to rich nutty brown hues.
- Hickory offers hues in beige and cocoa brown, with lighter blonde tones in the sapwood.
Considering consistency
When choosing a wood species for light-colored hardwood floors, it’s important to keep the consistency of color in mind. White Oak, Red Oak and White Maple tend to have more consistent color tones throughout the wood, while Ash, Hickory and Birch feature more variation, thanks to the contrast between the darker heartwood and lighter sap wood in these species. Choosing species with more contrast can help to achieve multi-colored hardwood floors.
Selecting a stain
Whether you start with a light-colored hardwood like Ash or White Maple or you prefer a darker hardwood with more dramatic grain personality like Hickory or Brown Maple, you can create a light-colored hardwood floor with a light-colored stain. While most hardwood floor manufacturers offer a limited choice of stains, at Carlisle the only limit to your color options is your imagination. We offer a variety of popular color options, but we also can match virtually any color of your choosing through our Carlisle Custom Color match system. Simply bring in a swatch of paint, a bit of tile or a section of fabric – or any other item – and we’ll create a stain that matches it perfectly.
Expect legendary service with your hardwood floors
When you create a light-colored hardwood floor with Carlisle, our design consultants will work with you every step of the way to turn your vision for a floor and color into a reality. Providing expert guidance, we’ll walk you through the variety of design options and the unique quality attributes of our wide plank floors. From choosing the species of hardwood and the width of the planks to your choice of color and finish to options for distressed wood flooring, prefinished flooring or engineered flooring, your Carlisle design consultant will help to make the process of creating your floor as pleasurable as living on it.
Why choose light-colored hardwood floors from Carlisle?
When you come to Carlisle for light-colored hardwood floors, you’ll be working with the premier provider of handcrafted wide plank floors in America. For more than 50 years, our craftsmen have used time-honored processes to create masterpieces in wood that perfectly reflect each homeowner’s sense of style and beauty. Your Carlisle floor will be a central design feature of your home, delighting and amazing you every time you walk through the door.
Our expert craftsman produce every floor with unmatched pride, passion and purpose, taking great pains to make sure every detail is right – from the selection of each plank to create a perfect floor to the nuance of a hand-scraped edge, to applying the perfect stain color for your light-colored hardwood floors.
With a strong commitment to sustainability, we strategically source our timber from growers who adhere to sustainable forestry practices, adhering to a forest-to-floor ethic that enables us to preserve natural resources while ensuring the beauty and quality of every plank in your Carlisle floor.
