During the pandemic we’ve seen an increase in customers enquiring about the best flooring for home offices. While look and feel is certainly important, so too is durability, sound absorption, comfort and cleaning. And each factor needs a little thought and discussion.
Durability
While your home office might not be receiving lots of visitors, it’s still a space you might be shuffling around for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, so its flooring does need to be durable. And then there’s the swivel chair, perhaps the most important consideration.
Allowing us to move around our home offices without getting up, our swivel chairs and their castors exert a tremendous pressure on the flooring underneath. And we need to ensure it moves freely without making any lasting damage.
Yes, a desk chair mat or a rug will help provide some protection, but the physical characteristics of the flooring underneath still need to be considered.
Sound
And in a world where video calls and phone calls are replacing more and more face-to-face meetings, the amount of noise produced by your flooring also becomes more important. Whether you’re rolling across it in your swivel chair or walking around it on a hands-free call, it ought to be quiet and help to reduce echo too.
Comfort
How your home office flooring feels underfoot may also be important to you. Is it nice and soft underfoot? Is it warm to the touch? And again, how much noise does it cause? These are all valid questions to pose, which each have a bearing on the flooring choice.
Cleaning
And of course, you don’t want to have to spend too many valuable office hours keeping the floor clean and tidy. Ideally it needs to be low maintenance, requiring the least amount of effort to maintain its appearance.
Home office flooring options
And so at Avonvale Carpets we provide you with an extensive choice of home office flooring options, covering a wide range of very different materials, lifetime expectancies and individual budgets:
Carpet for the home office
In a home setting of course you might well want to use carpet for your office. Sound insulating, warm under foot and pretty forgiving when it comes to house dust, it can be a great choice.
It does though need to be durable. That swivel chair’s tendency to squash or crush carpet means that a loop pile carpet is recommended or a high density, short twist pile carpet instead.
In nylon fibre, the Lano range for example offers a loop carpet called Corindo and a short, tufted option called Optima. While in wool, Telenzo’s Chelsea and Centre Point are a tight level loop pile solution.
Alternatively, a wool twist carpet with a short dense pile, like Cavalier’s Guildhall Twist or Architecture Regal ranges are another good option.
Luxury vinyl tiles (LVT) for the home office
Capturing the texture and detail of natural flooring materials, luxury vinyl tiles replicate all kinds of wooden and stone tiled floors. Offering good heat and sound insulation properties, it’s also resistant to scuffs, impact, moisture and stains.
For the home office then, Avonvale Carpets gives customers the choice of a complete range of LVT solutions, from all the leading manufacturers, including Distinctive, Invictus, Natural Solutions and Westex.
Sheet vinyl for the home office
Providing similar characteristics as LVT, sheet vinyl flooring is a lower cost option for the home office. Water resistant and easily cleaned, it offers a wide range of wood, stone, ceramic and concrete designs.
We recommend the best in modern sheet vinyl products, including the Designatex and Secura ranges from Polyflor, and Rhinofloor from Tarkett, providing a multitude of different designs, colours and textures.
Laminate for the home office
With its extra-strong wear layer, laminate flooring is another durable easy-clean solution for the home office. Closely imitating a wide range of wood and stone floors, it’s available in plank sizes and colours to suit all kinds of interior décor. At Avonvale Carpets we recommend laminate flooring from Natural Solutions.
Engineered wood for the home office
And if you want a real wooden floor for your home office then engineered wood provides a flooring solution that’s beautifully natural and long-lasting. It’s also more stable and more affordable than solid wood flooring
Produced in a range of beautiful hardwood species, including ash, elm, oak and walnut, engineered wood planks come in a choice of widths, grain grades, colours and finishes. Once more, our preferred manufacturers are Natural Solutions.
Pop in and see
To see all of these different flooring options for your home office, pop into the Avonvale shop on Kingsmead Square, Bath. We’ll show you them all, provide you with samples and help you decide on the best solution. We look forward to meeting you.