Contemporary Hardwood Floors

A guide to contemporary hardwood floors

While classic hardwood floors offer a sense of timeless beauty, many homeowners today are opting for contemporary hardwood floors to complement modern design aesthetics. From wider planks and texturing techniques to engineered floorboards and on-trend colors, the options for contemporary floors today are greater than ever.

In this brief introduction to contemporary hardwood floors, you’ll learn about the many choices available to you at Carlisle Wide Plank Floors. Contact us today to speak with a design consultant who can walk you through all your options. We’ll help you explore the benefits of unfinished and prefinished Maple flooring, the durability of bamboo flooring vs. Oak, and the way that color makes a floor feel more modern or traditional.

What are contemporary hardwood floors?

Contemporary hardwood floors are floors that follow the latest trends in color, structure, and woodworking techniques when designing hardwood flooring.

Does new flooring increase a home’s value?

Hardwood flooring is among the most popular flooring surfaces. New hardwood floors tend to add to a home’s value.

Choosing the wood species for your hardwood floors

When designing your contemporary hardwood floors, your first decision will be the type of wood species to use. While certain woods like Walnut and Cherry tend to have a more classic appeal, almost any hardwood can be stained, textured or treated to be part of a modern floor. Your Carlisle design consultant can walk you through the benefits of Ash wood vs. Oak and Birch vs. Brown Maple as you create the perfect contemporary hardwood floor.

Carlisle offers floors with 9 types of hardwood.

• Natural Ash hardwood flooring possess interesting grain patterns and varies in color from cream to light blonde to rich, nutty brown hues.
• Brown Maple features subtle and consistent grain patterns with rich hues of brown, gold and amber.
• White Maple has smooth, soft flowing grain and cleaner, lighter hues that are ideal for a more neutral floor.
• Birch floors are prized for their intriguing combination of color tones and varying grain patterns that range from subtle swirls to flame-like effects.
• Hickory is a handsome wood with color tones that range from lighter blonde and beige to cocoa brown.
• Red Oak floors have deep pinkish-salmon tones in the heartwood and tight, consistent grain.
• Rift & Quartersawn White Oak is sawn with special techniques that produce straight parallel lines in the grain for a strikingly beautiful floor.
• White Oak produces dense and durable boards with dramatic grain patterns and nutty brown hues.
• Cherry floors offer subtle but distinctive flowing grain patterns and lustrous deep, red hues.
• Walnut features complex grain patterns and rich, chocolate hues with undertones ranging from purple to yellow.

Customizing your contemporary hardwood floors

There are number of ways to make any hardwood floor feel more modern and contemporary.

Width of the planks

While traditional, commercial hardwood flooring features planks that are 2¼” to 3″ wide, wide plank flooring offers planks that are 5″ to 20″ wide and up to 12′ long. Consistent widths produce a more formal and traditional look, while random width flooring has a more casual feeling and greater visual interest.

Color of the stain

Contemporary hardwood floors often use color in interesting ways. From very light whitewash stains to medium grays or very dark charcoal stains, you can easily create a contemporary feel by choosing an on-trend color.

Texturing the wood

Interestingly, one of the most contemporary design trends is using texturing techniques like hand-scraped edges and saw marks that give new floorboards the appearance of antique floors.

Engineered floors

Engineered hardwood floors make it possible to consider hardwood flooring in places where traditional solid wood floors might not perform well. Engineered floors are made with a veneer of hardwood and multiple layers of backing material that help to resist changes in moisture and heat. With engineered floorboards, you can install hardwood floors below grade, over concrete slab and on radiant heat, bringing hardwood floors to contemporary locations like urban lofts, penthouses and trendy garden level locations.

Why Carlisle is #1 in contemporary hardwood floors

Every Carlisle floor is a masterpiece crafted in wood and designed to perfectly reflect the sensibility of the homeowner who commissions it. Crafted with unmatched pride, passion and purpose, our floors are destined to become a defining feature of your home, a central design element that will delight all who enter your space.

For more than 50 years, we’ve been crafting the finest wood floors in America by hand, using the highest quality raw materials available. Our artisan woodworkers obsess over every detail to ensure that the quality of your contemporary hardwood floors will exceed your expectations. Fashioned with time-honored processes and sustainable forestry practices, your Carlisle floor will be the surface that brings even greater warmth to your life at home, delighting and amazing you every time you cross the threshold.