Natural Flooring Options for Your Home – Top 5 Materials to Choose From

When it comes to choosing the best flooring, homeowners often get lost in the variety of materials, colors and cost of finishing materials. The market offers a huge range of natural flooring options for your home with a wide variety of properties and characteristics. Let’s look at the most popular types of eco-friendly flooring!

How to Choose the Right Floor Covering?

Whatever material you choose for your floor, it must meet the basic requirements. The right choice will determine the overall comfort of living, so you need to know the advantages and disadvantages of the different materials.

• Durability – the floor should not sag and deform;
• Reliability – when choosing a material, do not forget where you will use it. For example, using laminate floor in the bathroom is not at all reasonable.
• Soundproofing – pay attention to the sound absorbing properties of the material.
• Insulating properties – depending on where you will install the flooring material, you may need a floor that is pleasant to walk barefoot, so choosing natural wood is a good option.
• Aesthetics also plays an important role – the flooring should look beautiful and work with the interior style of your home.

What Are the Best Natural Flooring Options?

The group of natural flooring materials includes renewable materials like bamboo, cork, stone, tile, wood, concrete, terrazzo, leather, sisal, etc.

Natural Wood Floors

Among the top choices of homeowners are natural wood floors. This hardly comes as a surprise, since wood has been used for thousands of years. Wood floors come in two types – solid or engineered. Reclaimed wood floors are also an option, although they technically belong to the solid wood group. The benefits of wood floors are many – environmental friendliness and safety, exceptional appearance, natural beauty, durability, warmth and excellent insulating properties. Cherry, walnut, oak, maple, hickory, ash, teak, birch, pine – these are some of the options available at the market. Each wood species has its own unique characteristics, color and grain so you will surely find the best option that will complement your home interior.

Tile Flooring Options

Tiled floors are practical and comfortable. They were traditionally used in kitchens, bathrooms and hallways. Nowadays the variety of floor tile is vast – from ceramic tile, to terrazzo, from cement to encaustic tile. They come in almost any color, shape and size and have many advantages. Tiles are moisture and wear resistant, durable, resistant to chemicals, easy to maintain, etc. The main disadvantages of tiles are that without heating, the floors are cold and uncomfortable to walk on when barefoot. Tiles are fragile and if you drop something on it, a crack or chip may appear.

Natural Stone

Like wood, natural stone is a material used for floor coverings for hundreds and thousands of years. Natural stone kitchen flooring looks luxurious, noble and unique. Natural stone is used as a floor covering material since ancient times. Marble, granite, slate, limestone – these floors look magnificent! As a natural flooring material, stone is exceptionally durable and resistant to wear and mechanical stress. It is not afraid of temperature changes, and is not flammable.

Natural Flooring Options – Concrete Floors

One of the main advantages of concrete floors is their durability, resistance to scratches and mechanical damage. This type of flooring is safe, it does not attract dust, which makes it ideal for people suffering from allergies. The easy maintenance is another big plus while the fact that the floor is pretty hard is a serious disadvantage.

Bamboo Flooring

Many people do not know that bamboo is not wood, but grass. This is one of the most environmentally friendly, renewable materials. Bamboo floors are durable, resistant to moisture, stains and are an excellent option for areas with heavy traffic. The maintenance is easy and one of the most important advantages is that they are more affordable than natural wood.