Floors that Complete the Decorative Scheme of a Room

One of the most important elements in the success of a room designed to be beautiful as a whole in structure and color scheme, is the floor. Whether it be a more or less elaborate parquet floor or one made simply of plain boards, it must be in harmony with the color chosen for the wood trim of the room. Also it should invariably be at least as dark as the woodwork, if the effect of restfulness is to be preserved. A floor that strikes a higher note of color than the woodwork above it, even if it be otherwise harmonious in tone, gives the room a top-heavy, glaring effect that no furniture or decoration will remove.

Full directions for finishing floors will be given later in the chapter on wood finishes. While the Craftsman method of finishing woodwork differs widely from others, it does not apply so much to the floor, for here a tiller should be used for precisely the same reason that it should be avoided in the treatment of furniture and woodwork, as it destroys the texture of the wood by covering it with a glassy, smooth and impervious surface. Texture is not needed in the wood of a floor, which October, 1905. should be entirely smooth and non-absorbent.

The first of the three floors illustrated here is meant to complete the color scheme of a room in which the woodwork is of silver -im; maple and the furniture and decorations are in delicate tones such as would naturally harmonize with gray. The floor is very simple in design, having a plain center of silver-gray maple that is finished exactly like the woodwork of the room. Around the edge is a wide border of “mahajua,” a beautiful Cuban hard-wood, close and smooth in grain and left in its natural color, which is a greenish gray slightly darker than the finish of the maple.

The second floor is made of quartered oak in the natural color, and the boards are bound together with keys of vulcanized oak. Where the floor is stained to match the woodwork in tone, the color value of boards and keys will remain the same, as the vulcanized oak keys will simply show a darker shade of whatever color is given the boards of plain oak. The last illustration shows a floor of quartered oak in the natural color combined with vulcanized oak and white maple to form a border in which a primitive Indian design appears.