SPECIAL FOCUS PATTERN & COLOUR COMBINATIONS Compare an Rosa Wynn-Jones, Senior FF&E Designer from interior design consultancy Go


Flooring is one of the great weapons in the interior design armoury, helping designers express the look and feel of a scheme, creating a platform for furnishings and helping with legion practical missions, from safety, via anti-slip flooring in areas like kitchens and bathrooms, to off-setting temperature requirements. It’s all very well, for example, to have terracotta tiling throughout when you live in the Mediterranean, but quite a different matter in the cold of Northern Europe, where the use of tiling may necessitate underfloor heating! Climate affects colour choices too, with warm tones creating cosiness in a chillier clime and cooler tones providing a calming feel in a warmer location. Thick carpeting can also help with acoustics, whilst varied flooring treatments within a scheme can be used to add emphasis, to frame a certain zone, as well as to create boundaries and borders.


As a practice, we work mostly at the high-end of the residential market, creating multi-unit luxury apartments and penthouses in sought-after central locations. We also work in hospitality, designing hotels for some of the world’s leading brands, including Intercontinental, Hilton, Corinthia and Sheraton Hotels. Flooring is something we think about very carefully on all our schemes and, mostly, we’re looking for subtle, bespoke and innovative evocations of quality, with a certain amount of caution when it comes to colour and pattern. Flooring is a high- cost item after all, and clients don’t want to have to change a floor too often, when it is more cost-effective to update soft furnishings or accessories. Nonetheless, we use a huge range of flooring types, from timber and marble to bespoke rugs and carpets, as well as stone and ceramic tiles, plus every conceivable kind of rubber or high-end vinyl finish and are always looking for the extra edge in terms of innovative finishes.


Currently, the dominant fashion in residential settings is to use timber throughout, with added rugs or fitted


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carpets for bedrooms and marble for bathrooms. Using a single flooring choice in this way adds to a feeling of continuity and increases a sense of space. Walnut, so in vogue throughout the naughties, is less in demand now, with oak and wenge more likely to be specified by designers. Variety and contrast can still be created, however, through the way the timber is laid, from the use of herringbone and chevron patterns to either short or long-laid strips or, to be really different, diagonal strips. Colour can be added with a wash or, more graphically, by painting or glossing timber to create borders or frames.


Rugs and carpets add pattern or set a mood. In the high-end sector, we tend to work with manufacturers to create bespoke sizes, patterns or colourways, so that the product is always unique for that environment. It’s certainly possible to mix and clash patterns, but this has to be


done with caution and an expert touch. Patterns can be a real differentiator in a space, but to use well, it’s important to select which pattern you want to sing the loudest and make the others more subdued or calming. If the first pattern is small-scale, then the others should be large-scale and vice versa.


Marble is still the ultimate for high- end bathrooms and we often contrast different marbles within a scheme, using one for the floor, a second for the walls and a third for the vanity units, for example. Alternatively, a two-tone marble bathroom can be created with borders breaking the space down into geometric shaping. Innovation can be subtle; for the bathrooms at the Gleneagles Hotel, we laid the floor in herringbone marble, using a pattern more typically used for timber.


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