STEP INSIDE KITCHEN
Feast Your Eyes
Leigh Price, Managing Director of Real Stone & Tile, shares his top tips on how to help your customers choose the right kitchen floor to suit them.
The kitchen is known for being the heart of the home; the focal point of a property which demands both style and substance in equal measure.
When I talk to my customers about what they want from their kitchen flooring, several answers spring to mind. As the kitchen caters for a range of activities, from socialising with friends to cooking with the kids, they need a floor which exudes style and quality, but is cost-effective and durable.
When deciding on a floor, there are numerous areas to consider, including colour, material, durability, style and size.
To achieve maximum impact and a timeless design, the floor needs to complement fixtures and fittings, cupboard doors and appliances. Often with very vibrant kitchen cupboards or work surfaces, a more muted colour palette is needed on the floor, to help balance the room.
The age and style of a property can also influence flooring; an ultra modern home could boast large format tiles, whilst a small 18th
Century cottage might benefit from a more traditional looking wood-effect porcelain tile.
Depending on the room size and use, your customers might have more than one floor to contend with. In modern homes, open-plan living is now the norm – housing a kitchen, dining and living space in one room, with many featuring split floors, to help divide the space. This means a larger area, which has to complement different styles and colour
26 | Tomorrow’s Retail Floors schemes, with an inevitably bigger price tag.
I think it’s important to establish if the whole room is being refurbished, or if it’s just the floor that they want to change. If your customer is looking to change their kitchen units in a year’s time, it might be better to acquire all the elements together, to ensure colours can be matched to get the best end result.
A common concern which customers often share focuses on the durability of kitchen flooring. They worry that laminate might chip or wood might stain, whilst tiles offer a highquality, robust solution to this problem, which is often required in a busy environment such as a kitchen.
Wood-effect tiles are becoming a popular choice amongst homeowners, especially in large open-plan kitchens. Many of my customers are opting for this new style because the tiles are so low maintenance when compared to the ‘real thing’. There is no need to varnish or treat the product, and there is no danger of the colour fading or warping, which can be a worry with wooden floors.
Real Stone & Tile is open to both the trade and the public, specialising in a wide range of tiles. The tile and bathroom suite retailer also boasts a vast portfolio of contemporary and designer tiles, large format tiles, natural stone tiles, wood effect tiles, feature tiles and mosaics, sanitary ware, wet rooms and brassware.
www.realstoneandtile.co.uk www.tomorrowsretailfloors.com
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