Whether you're building your dream home or renovating your existing property, selecting all your fixtures and finishes can be an overwhelming and exhausting process. From paint colour to tapware, cupboard handles and flooring, the decisions feel endless. Interior designers will all tell you it's imperative not to make any selections in isolation, but rather as a collective to ensure you bring together your style and chosen colour palette cohesively. When embarking on this process, it's important to narrow down your colour and style choices. It’s also important to view your selections in person and not rely on photos or swatch images, so be sure to gather samples of your shortlist so you can make a more informed decision.
When it comes to tapware and handles, a physical sample can help you feel the texture and see if the finish marks easily with fingerprints. Similarly, when selecting paint, flooring and window furnishings, samples can help you examine fabric weight and quality, durability and allow you to visualise how colours, textures, and materials will look together in your space, ensuring a harmonious and functional outcome.
This is also particularly important when it comes to flooring. Luxury vinyl, hybrid and laminate flooring products are designed to replicate the appearance of natural timbers and stones, capturing their rich textures and diverse colours as they appear in nature. This focus on authenticity means that these types of flooring will often display strong colour variation from plank to plank or tile to tile, which often cannot be replicated or displayed accurately online.
Factors Contributing to Flooring Colour Variation
Several factors can contribute to slight colour differences between products, samples, and digital representations. Here are the key considerations:
Digital Variation
Digital displays, such as computer monitors, smartphones, and tablets, can vary significantly. Factors like device settings, screen resolution, and lighting conditions can all affect how a product’s colour appears. As a result, the colour you see on your screen may not perfectly match the actual product. Adding flooring samples to a flat lay mood board can help you to visualise if it complements your existing furniture and decor, selected window treatments and other finishes.
Lighting Variation
The lighting in the space where the flooring is installed can greatly impact its perceived colour. Different light sources, such as natural daylight, incandescent, fluorescent, or LED lighting, can make a colour look different. Viewing the product under various lighting conditions, ideally in the room where it will be installed, will help you get a true sense of its colour.
Production Batch Variation
Due to the manufacturing processes used to create luxury vinyl plank, laminate and hybrid flooring products, there may be slight colour variations between different production batches or films. These minor variations are a natural part of the production process.
Whilst every effort is made to ensure that the colours displayed in our samples and on our website are as accurate as possible, digital variations, lighting conditions and production batch differences can result in some colour variations.
Top Tips for Selecting Flooring
To help you achieve the best possible outcome and ensure the flooring you choose meets your expectations, here are some helpful tips:
Tip #1: Viewing Multiple Flooring Samples
Selecting the right flooring for your project is a big decision, and colour is a key factor in that choice. However, it’s essential to remember that samples, such as boards, planks or swatches, only represent a small portion of the product’s overall pattern and design. We recommend viewing multiple sample types to get a clearer understanding of the product’s pattern repeat. Additionally, you can view the full swatch image pattern repeat on our website.
Tip #2: Ensuring a Balanced Colour Blend
To achieve a cohesive and natural look when installing laminate, luxury vinyl or hybrid flooring, we recommend selecting tiles or planks from at least three different boxes. Shuffling them before installation helps create a more even blend of colour and design. For the best results, we also recommend dry laying and reviewing the flooring in its intended space before the final installation to confirm that the colour and design distribution meet your expectations.
For more detailed information on our flooring colour variation, download our Product Colour Variation Factsheet. Don’t forget to visit our product pages and order your flooring samples so you can start creating your real life moodboards.
