The Perfect Floor for your Home Office
Having access to a space in your home which inspires productivity and concentration has become more important than ever since the start of the pandemic. Whether you work from home once a week or full time, a home office has become a modern staple of work-life. While making a home office may seem like an easy task, developing a space which energises and motivates you is certainly more work than assembling a desk, chair and some stationary equipment in a room.
There are many aspects of a home office which influence your productivity, and often, the importance of good floor is overlooked. Flooring choices can make the difference between a home office which motivates you and one which drains you. Keep these flooring tips in mind when developing your home office.
Tip 1: Keep it Simple
First things first, keep it simple. While you don’t want to evoke the stereotype of a boring office space, keeping your home office simple will help clear your mind when work gets busy. While there are many floors with lively and eccentric patterns, a more minimalist floor such as a straight pattern, herringbone or chevron will be less distracting and create a more calming environment for your office space.
Tip 2: Create a Calm Space with Neutral Colours
Neutral colours are calming and provide a sense of serenity – something which we could all use from an office. Neutral coloured floors are also less likely to distract you, helping you focus on getting the most out of your work day.
While they may have a reputation of being boring, neutral colours provide a great base for various decorative styles. Having a neutral coloured actually floor gives you more opportunity to integrate colour and statement pieces in your home office, as your décor is less likely to clash with your floor and distract you.
Tip 3: Use Vinyl or Laminate Floors for Scratch and Wear-resistance
Vinyl and Laminate floors are the best options for a home office. This is largely due to their smooth texture, and in the case of Vinyl floors, its noise-dampening abilities.
Having a floor which isn’t well equipped for the rolling and sliding of an office chair can cause damage to the floor and chair alike. The benefit of Vinyl and Laminate floors comes not only from their smooth texture, which allows your office chair to move smoothly, but also from their durability and scratch and wear-resistance.
Vinyl floors additionally have a sound-absorbing effect, minimizing distraction and allowing you to concentrate better. While Laminate floors are not equipped with sound-absorption, if installed in a smaller room their sound should largely go unnoticed.
Tip 4: Separate Your Office from the Rest of Your Home with Your Floor
Separating our home and work space is important, especially if they happen to be in the same home. Our brains are more productive when they don’t associate our work space with recreation. A subtle but powerful tool to make this distinction is to create visual separation by using a different floor pattern or colour in your office than in the rest of your home.
A home office should be a productive, practical and durable place in your home. It is an interior trend which doesn’t appear to be losing traction any time soon, and may even take precedence over office working, in the future. Want to see how a Solidfloor floor would look in your office? Simply try out our Solidfloor Floorplanner to find your perfect floor, and visit one of our many points of sale to pick it up.