Contrasting Hardwood Floors

The beauty of contrasting hardwood floors

When installing hardwood floors in your home, there’s no rule that says the wood in each room has to match. While using the same type of hardwood throughout the space can create a unified appearance, choosing contrasting hardwood floors can make a strong visual statement that turns your floors into a central design element of your home.

At Carlisle Wide Plank Floors, our design specialists can work closely with you to create a plan for contrasting hardwood floors that maximizes the beauty of the surfaces in each room. We’ll assist in designing the transitions between rooms that are critical for making mixed hardwood flooring look terrific. And we can help you explore lots of other options for your floors – from random width flooring and diagonal hardwood flooring to patterned floors and textured surfaces.

What are contrasting hardwood floors?

Contrasting hardwood floors are surfaces made of hardwood planks that have contrasting color, personality, width, pattern or other characteristics.

Can you mix different wood floors in a house?

Yes. With care, it’s easy to mix different types of hardwood floors in the same house. You might contrast the dark colors of Walnut in one room with the light hues of White Maple in another. Or you can combine two different types of hardwoods in a single room to create a patterned floor.

What are the benefits of contrasting hardwood floors?

While uniform hardwood floors create a sense of flow throughout a house, contrasting wood floors help to support a different aesthetic statement in each room.

What are the rules for installing contrasting hardwood floors?

When mixing hardwood floors, it’s important to make sure that the hues of each hardwood are different enough that the choice seems purposeful rather than a mistake. Providing clear transitions between different floors in different rooms will help to sharpen the contrast.

Can hardwood floors be laid differently in different rooms?

Yes. You can create contrasting hardwood floors by installing the floorboards diagonally in one room and horizontally in another. Patterned floors can help to create visual interest.

Choosing the wood for your contrasting floors

When selecting wood for your floors, Carlisle offers a variety of hardwood flooring.

• Hickory features interesting grain patterns and a color palette that runs from lighter blonde to beige to rich, cocoa brown. Hickory is one of the most durable hardwoods in the flooring industry, with a tensile strength that rivals steel.
• Brown Maple offers subtle and consistent grain patterns with occasional swirls, and striking color variations with rich, brown streaks in the heartwood.
• White Maple features cleaner and lighter hues that are reminiscent of flowing water. With strikingly beautiful grain patterns, White Maple is a more neutral floor that can work with a range of traditional and contemporary settings.
• Cherry features deep and glowing red colors and lustrous hues that darken as the hardwood ages. With subtle but distinctive flowing grain patterns, Cherry is a popular choice for both traditional and contemporary design schemes.
• Ash is an amazingly dense and durable wood with unique elasticity. It’s prized for its interesting grain patterns and neutral hues that make it easy to achieve certain color tones.
• Birch has an organic feel with more personality in the grain – but without feeling too loud or overly rustic. Birch offers an intriguing combination of hues that run from blonde outer edges with warm amber bits and rich reddish-brown in the heartwood.
• Walnut features mocha hues with auburn undertones and complex grain patterns. The beauty of this wood makes Walnut in demand for everything from urban lofts to formal sitting rooms to rustic country kitchens.
• Red Oak floorboards feature tight, consistent grain and deep salmon tones in the heartwood. One of the most popular flooring choices, Red Oak can be as rustic or as modern as needed.
• White Oak features dramatic grain patterns and rich hues of nutty brown and cocoa color tones. White Oak is easy to stain and can complement any design scheme from contemporary to formal to casual.
• Rift and Quartersawn White Oak features tight, straight parallel grain lines that run the entire length of the plank. These floorboards are cut at 90-degree angles from the surface of the log to create strikingly beautiful hardwood floors.
• Eastern White Pine is a softwood that wears in over time to create a warm, inviting appearance that enhances the unique character of a home. Featuring dense, signature grain with subtle knots, Eastern White Pine is a lighter wood that offers versatile finish possibilities.
• Heart Pine is a harder wood that rivals the density of Red Oak. Heart Pine floors show a range of personality, from boards with tight knots and vertical grain to planks with wider lines, extravagant knots and cathedral wood patterns.
• Hit or Miss Pine floors are an authentic reproduction of centuries-old floorboards that were cut at watermills. Craftsmen reproduce the saw marks that were often left on boards when the cutting blades would skip across the lumber.

Contrasting hardwood floors with exceptional customer service

When you choose contrasting hardwood floors from Carlisle, the expertise of our customer service team will impress you just as much as the quality of our floors. From your first conversation with a wide plank specialist through the delivery and installation of your Carlisle floor, our team will work closely with you to understand your vision, answer your questions and ensure that every detail of your floor exceeds your expectations – and ours. Our knowledgeable design consultants have years of experience helping homeowners to design floors that are the perfect expression of their sense of style. At Carlisle, the process of creating a one-of-a-kind wide plank floor is truly a pleasure.

Why choose contrasting hardwood floors Carlisle?

When you come to Carlisle for contrasting hardwood floors, your floor will be handcrafted with time-honored techniques as well as the highest quality timber sourced from America’s finest forests. For more than 50 years, we’ve been a leader in flooring excellence, fashioning the finest surfaces in America one plank at a time. Our artisan craftsmen take great pains to ensure that every detail is perfect – from selecting floorboards that reveal the beauty of the wood to applying the perfect stain color or hand-scraping every plank. With Carlisle, you can have confidence that your contrasting hardwood floors will become a defining feature of your home that will delight and amaze for years to come.