The Secret Reason Some Rooms Feel Instantly Finished

There were two rooms, both decorated with the same sofa, same paint, same lighting at the same time of day. One felt finished and warm, the other unfinished and somehow cold. The only difference between the two rooms was the floor.

What sound is telling you

Every room has a sound – a slight acoustic. The acoustic of a room with a hard floor (such as stone, wood or bare boards) tends to have a lot of reverb in the mid frequency area. High frequency sounds such as the ringing of a bell or the high pitched yelp of a child will not be affected by the floor. However the mid frequency sounds (such as human voices or the sound of furniture being moved about) will bounce off the walls and from the ceiling of the room. This creates a sort of ‘reverb’ or ‘echo’ that most people are never even aware of. However, most people do sense the space in a room with a hard floor and feel that it feels cold and unfinished. This is why so many rooms with hard floors are carpeted – it’s not the decorators that have made the final decision, it’s the carpet.

How the eye judges scale

Another important factor to take into account is the texture of your floor. This will also affect how we perceive the scale of your room. Smooth surfaces with no texture, such as pale stone or varnished boards, can create the illusion of a large, empty space. Pile or heavy textured flooring on the other hand can create the illusion of a smaller, more full room. This is because the texture of the flooring stops our eye travelling around the room and forces us to measure out the space using the bumps and grooves of the floor.

Why some floors feel colder even when they aren’t

Some surfaces conduct heat away from bare skin more quickly than others. So even though the temperature in the room is the same as it would be with carpet, the floor feels cooler to the skin of people walking around on bare feet.

In many of Edinburgh’s Victorian tenements the contrast between hard and soft flooring is particularly pronounced. These properties have tall, often vaulted, plaster ceilings and hard stone closes. This means that rooms have an ‘echo’ which is greatly diminished by soft flooring.

A useful reference for understanding your options for Flooring Edinburgh is kristoffersencarpets.com.

We spend hours agonizing over the perfect paint colour and the ultimate sofa. But the floor was establishing the mood of the room long before either of those pieces arrived.