Guest Post: Choosing Your Office Floor Covering – Carpet vs. Hardwood

Guest Post: Choosing Your Office Floor Covering – Carpet vs. Hardwood

Playing as big a part in your office branding and atmosphere as office furniture and wall colours, your office flooring should be put under serious scrutiny. However, with so many options available it can be difficult to choose the one most suited to your working environment, which is why I’ve rounded up the pros and cons of two of the most popular options – carpet and hardwood flooring.

CARPET
Traditional and timeless, carpeted floors are still as popular as ever and provide a cost-effective, easily accessible solution for all kinds of office environments.

Carpeted Flooring

Pros
• Carpet is quicker to fit than hardwood options, especially when easily transportable carpet tiles are available.
• The range of colours, patterns, fabrics and piles for carpets is vast, meaning you can customise your choice to fit your company branding and the footfall experienced in a certain area of your headquarters to minimise wear and tear.
• Excess noise from shoes and chair wheels is next to nothing on carpets.
• Carpets actually help insulate a room; essential for chilly winter months.

Cons
• Carpeted floors make it much harder to push a wheeled chair away from a desk, which can become an inconvenience for employees who are up and down a lot.
• Carpets are liable to fading and are far more difficult to clean than hardwood options.

HARDWOOD
Hardwood flooring is a really popular, on-trend solution for business owners, even Grace Lewis posted earlier this month about how to utilise it as an environmentally friendly building material.

Hardwood Flooring

Pros
• Available in real wood or a cost-effective alternative, hardwood flooring is versatile and doesn’t have to cost the earth.
• It’s easy to sweep, hoover and mop clean when stained or peppered with crumbs.
• Rolling chairs across hardwood flooring is – if they incorporate the relevant castors for the floor type – effortless, making it easier for staff to get up from their desks.

Cons
• Hard floors are notorious for amplifying noises like shoe heels, which could get very distracting for anyone trying to work. However, you can overcome the problem by investing in acoustically backed wood effect flooring.
• While easy to free from food stains, it’s harder to remove things like heel scuffs from hardwood flooring that doesn’t incorporate slip resistance or hardness scales.
• Hardwood isn’t the most insulating solution, and can make a room feel colder on chilly days.

While both flooring options come with their own pros and cons, at the end of the day it all depends on the room they’ll be placed in and the activity they’ll see. While areas with a larger footfall (like receptions) could benefit from durable hardwood, your main office area may be better suited to the quieter alternative of carpet to stop the reverberation of distracting sounds.

Do you have a preferred floor covering for your office?

This is a guest post by interior designer, Victoria Crawcour of Desk Centre; office refit specialists and suppliers of office furniture via their online shop.

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