How to Decorate When You Have Dark Timber Floors

We wanted to move away from just looks when choosing our flooring for our new build, and work out why light or dark will or will not work. We had chosen grey ironbark timber for living "wing" and bedroom "wing" - both of which were on stumps to follow the lie of the land. Now we wanted tiles on our concrete slab thermal mass in the centre.

We found a preferred light limestone beige tile, and a dark flow waterfall tile. Both were more consistant in colour but had some texture variant in the pattern. I collected about 150 photos from houzz with light floors, dark floors, light walls with dark floors, dark walls with light floors. We looked through them and learned things.

Here’s what we learned (about us as much as about tiles) -

• Large rooms with a large view window (eg our dining/kitchen room), when surrounded by white floor, white ceiling and white walls, can feel quite boxed in. The walls clutter the eye as you look out the view window.
• In rooms with a view window, dark floors seem to disappear as one looks out to the view ahead.
• Those same large rooms with dark floors “feel” softer on the eye if the walls are off-white. White walls are too stark and cold. Dark walls begin to feel moody.
• Bathrooms with black floors feel cramped.
• Black floors and white wall tiles yell, “Hello! I’m a wall!”
• A section of dark walls tends to relax our eyes.

So, after looking through all the photos to learn a pattern of how we felt, we then went through them again and deleted any that didn’t work for us. Our preference became very clear to us.

Here’s what we’ve decided.

• The dark tile will go in the kitchen/dining area. That area looks out to the North and south with sliding doors. Our beautiful inherited wooden dining table with carved red-brown timber legs will be the room centrepiece, alongside a timber topped island bench. The front entry (between the dining room dark tile and living room grey ironbark timber floors) will be also dark tile flowing into the dining room, as will the passage to the bathrooms
• At this stage we’re planning to use the ivory tile of the same waterfall series on the floors of the powder, bathrooms and laundry. This will create a room separation between the public and private areas, allow the bathroom to look large and clean
• The dark tile will also go on the walls only of the open shower alcove in the bathrooms. The room seems to become "sizeless". The walls seem to disappear.

Hopefully this works!

Thank you for helping me with my homework... lots to consider

Black ceiling light fixtures