Hallway flooring needs to tick several different boxes. It needs to present a good first impression to anyone entering your home, it needs to feel good to walk on and it needs to be easy to clean and maintain due to heavy foot traffic.
In this post, we cover the major recommended flooring options for hallway floors so you can make a decision that’s both stylish and practical.
Suitable Options for Hallways
The size and nature of the hallway can be quite unique compared to other rooms of your home. If your property is like most people’s terraced houses, for instance, it’s likely you’ll have a narrow and potentially quite long length of room that leads off to other rooms of your house, and possibly your staircase.
Additionally, this area is a centre point from which the different colours and tones of your various rooms intercede. Also, you’ll need to select flooring and floor coverings that are more forgiving underfoot as people are likely to enter your home with shoes on and potentially track muck and dirt into the house. Below are some of the major floor options that work well in most homes.
Hard Floor Options
A classic and much-desired flooring option is natural or man-made floor tiles. Available in many different colors and textures, they can offer both sophistication and character. If you are choosing natural stone floor tiles, however, bear in mind that not all are suitable for high traffic areas.
It is worth checking that a particular stone tile will cope with the workload of a hall. Also, you will need to ensure you achieve a completely smooth and reliable floor finish before you apply any ceramic or stone tiling to your floor surface.
While hallway flooring tiles are a popular choice, they’re not the only hard floor option you can consider. If you want hard flooring that’s suitable for a hallway wooden flooring, vinyl and laminate flooring are all worth investigating.
Wooden flooring in a hallway is a beautiful option for many homes. For some, wood flooring is the ultimate flooring option offering style, comfort and a natural feel. Also mid-toned finishes and dark woods will be more forgiving in terms of showing up dust and dirt.
Vinyl flooring can also work incredibly well in your hallway and offer you a firm yet slightly bouncy hallway surface. Vinyl flooring can reproduce the look of wooden boards or parquet, stone, or even patterned tiles too.
Like laminate, good vinyl flooring is relatively affordable while being slightly softer and quieter underfoot, so this might be the way to go to cut down on clatter when the family troop in and out. And one of the biggest benefits of this material is it can be cut to any difficult or unique hallway shape and applied easily.
Want Something Softer?
Carpet is the hallway flooring material in many people’s homes throughout the UK. However, while being affordable, it does come with a few drawbacks. Carpets can’t be mopped if shoes or paws bring mud in for instance. They also don’t look very modern or stylish when compared with other more sleek hard surface finishes.
Nevertheless, carpets offer classic comfort on the toes and provide good resistance. For a compromise, some homeowners opt for wooden or tile flooring with carpet rugs or fabric runners that stretch the length of the hallway, to reduce damage to the natural flooring and offer some added comfort. Whenever it gets too dirty, you can simply have it cleaned or replaced.
A few questions to ask yourself when choosing between soft or hard flooring options are: Do you want a particular tone or hue that is only achievable in a certain material? Are you a fan of a certain texture? Do you want your flooring to match the rest of your home? How prepared are you to regularly maintain and clean your hallway flooring?
Which Options Work Well with Underfloor Heating?
Hard hallway flooring such as stone, porcelain, and ceramic tiles combine effectively with underfloor heating and provide good heat output. Also, solid wood flooring can be suitable for use with underfloor heating too, but it’s worth checking with your contractor first about the way wood will react to heat differentiation.
While carpets are not typically used with modern instalments of underfloor heating, it can technically be combined with these systems too if a suitable underlay is used, just like laminates and vinyl. In truth, the important thing to consider is how efficiently each material transfers heat energy to the floor surface and home.
How to Achieve a Solid Base Layer
At UK Screed, we can help you achieve the perfect base layer for any flooring option and can help you produce a perfectly flat and even surface that works particularly well with tiled flooring or other floor finishes. If you’re looking to hire liquid screed contractors in Oxford, get in touch with us for a quote or some advice on your next floor project.
