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When you’re designing your residential or commercial space, you have a choice between standard commercial flooring or high-quality hardwood flooring. Because the difference between standard and high-quality floors is significant, it’s important to understand exactly what high-quality flooring is and what options are available to you. This primer offers a brief introduction and is designed to answer all your questions about high-quality hardwood flooring.
High-quality hardwood flooring is fashioned with woods, stains, textures and patterns that may not be available in standard commercial flooring. High-quality hardwood flooring is designed to provide more elegance and luxury to a home or business space, and to make the floor a central design feature rather than an afterthought or an invisible element. Typically higher end floor is individually crafted by hand specifically for your project and is not a boxed product sitting in a large warehouse.
Wide plank floors like those from Carlisle are an excellent example of high-quality hardwood flooring. Wide plank floors are made with boards that may be as much as 20” wide and 16’ long. Compare that to standard commercial flooring with boards that are nor more than 3” wide and 4’ long and you’ll quickly see the difference between wide plank and traditional floors. Wide planks allow the beauty and personality of the wood and its grain to emerge on every floorboard, and they give the room a greater sense of spaciousness and luxury. Standard commercial floors, in contrast, feel cluttered and busy because they contain far more seams between boards.
Customers who choose high-quality hardwood flooring understand that the choice of flooring can be as important to design as wall color, window coverings, furniture and art. High-quality hardwood flooring makes a stunning visual statement and can become a central part of the aesthetic of a business or residence.
When designing high-quality hardwood flooring, your first decision is the type of wood to use. Carlisle offers 10 hardwood species:
• Ash hardwood flooring is amazingly dense and comes in hues from cream to light blonde to rich nutty brown hues.
• Birch floors have a dramatic beauty with boards that feature blonde outer edges and warm amber portions, along with grain patterns that range from highly figured flames to subtle swirls.
• Brown Maple floors feature hues of rich gold, amber and brown as well as subtle and consistent grain patterns.
• Cherry floors have a burnished auburn color paired with subtle but distinctive flowing grain patterns.
• Hickory is one of the strongest floors with strength rivals steel and hues from lighter blonde sapwood to cocoa brown and beige heartwood.
• Red oak hardwood flooring has deep, salmon tones and comes in exceptional widths and lengths.
• Walnut offers rich chocolate/mocha hues with surprising auburn undertones and complex grain patterns.
• White Maple delivers strikingly beautiful grain patterns that resemble flowing water, along with clean and lighter hues for a more neutral finish.
• White Oak it is a versatile and dense wood with dramatic grain patterns that range from simple and sleek lines to vibrant swirls.
• Rift & Quartersawn White Oak floorboards are cut with special techniques that produce straight parallel lines in the grain with vibrant ray flecks that radiate across each board. Carlisle also provides 3 types of Pine floors and 6 types of reclaimed wood floors with timber that has been salvage from centuries-old buildings.
Almost any high-quality hardwood flooring can be stained and wide variety of colors, though it’s important to match the wood with a proper stain that won’t obscure the personality of the wood and its grain patterns. Carlisle offers wide variety of stains for both light and dark wood flooring.
In addition to your choice of wood, high-quality hardwood flooring can be customized by your choice in stain colors. At Carlisle, we offer a virtually unlimited range of stains. You can also customize floors by texturing or distressing them, and by installing them in a parquet pattern like Chevron, Herringbone or Versailles.
High-quality hardwood flooring can be cleaned just as you would clean standard commercial flooring. A mixture of vinegar and water is a great solution, mixing 1 or 2 ounces of white vinegar with 2 gallons of water. Vinegar has a natural acidity that helps to strip away dirt and contaminants while also being safe for floors and the environment.
Distressed or textured hardwood flooring is treated with a variety of techniques to give it an aged appearance, resembling the floorboards that were handcrafted a century or more ago. Distressed floorboards may be given hand-scraped edges that resemble the hand-sculpted quality of floorboards crafted before the advent of machines. Boards can also be distressed with saw marks that resemble the swirls and kerfs from old-time sawmills, or treated to reproduce the wear caused by age and foot traffic.
While unfinished flooring must be sanded, stained and sealed on-site, prefinished flooring is completed in the manufacturer’s facility and requires no finishing on-site. Prefinished flooring thus simplifies and accelerates the installation process while sparing home and business owners from the mess and inconvenience of finishing a hardwood floor on-site. While some prefinished floors have a cheap or plastic look, Carlisle’s proprietary processes make prefinished floors indistinguishable from floors that have been finished on-site.
Engineered hardwood flooring uses floorboards that are made with multiple layers of hardwood and backing that is glued together to form a core which is more resistant to temperature and humidity. Carlisle engineered flooring is made with a thick veneer of hardwood. Engineered flooring is ideal for installation in basements, on concrete slabs and over radiant heating systems.
The one thing that sets Carlisle apart from every other producer of high-quality hardwood flooring: exceptional quality. For more than five decades, the Carlisle name has represented leadership, tradition and innovation in custom wood floors. Each of our floors is a one-of-a-kind, handcrafted masterpiece, created to be a perfect reflection of the home or business owner’s sense of style and beauty. A Carlisle floor is not just a surface to walk on in – it’s a stunning design feature that adds elegance and luxury to your space and sets the stage for your home or business life. Our commitment to extraordinary customer service is as legendary as our floors. From guiding you through the many decisions involved in creating your floor to helping you customize it with color, texture, pattern and more, our team is constantly available to answer your questions and ensure every detail meets your high standards and ours.
