These 8 Designer Rooms Prove It's Time to Start Painting Your Floors
These 8 Designer Rooms Prove It's Time to Start Painting Your Floors
With a stroke of a brush, decorative painting is making its way onto the floor. Appreciation for theatrical hand-stenciled designs and arresting accents on floors has skyrocketed in recent years. The freedom of the paintbrush allows artists and designs to conjure up magical scenes and intricate patterns that complement the room's architecture flawlessly.
However, by no means is this a new trend. Early iterations of painted floors can be traced all the way to France during 15th century. During that time, artisans and homeowners began covering the floors in painted cloths which often featured decorative patterns and motifs. The trend would later be adopted by the American colonies in the 1700s when floors were often painted to look like marble. Eventually the floor cloths were abandoned and patterns were painted directly onto the floors in many early American homes, including the entry hall of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.
Early Americans’ painted imitations of lavish floors proved more than a frugal experiment. These painted floors have managed to find solid decorative footing and paved the way for today's vivid modern revival. Here, a look at eight designer-approved painted floor ideas—plus, how a painted floor can transform an entire room.
1) The New Royal Treatment
Forget the red carpet: Bunny Mellon welcomed confidante and frequent guest Jacqueline Onassis to the 19th-century guest cabin at her Oak Spring home in Virginia by commissioning faux painter Malcolm Robson to create these diamond-patterned etched floors. The cabin has since changed hands, but the checkerboard painted floor remains.
2) This Way, Please
“I paint as many floors as I can,” says New York designer Jeffrey Bilhuber, who used an oversized chevron pattern in a Wyoming log house “to balance the warmth of the timber." He adds, We didn’t need more brown wood; we needed something uplifting, unifying.” Plus, the pattern subtly pivots attention from the working end of the kitchen toward the fireplace, a refreshing nudge if ever there was.
3) Advanced Geometry
“I decorate rooms from the bottom up,” says Bunny Williams, believing floors to have a profound effect on the ambience of a home. “It’s a mistake to think you must live with the floors that come with your house.” Case in point: her bedroom in New York, where moments of faux marbling tuck into a tonal network of diamonds and squares.
4) Folk Art Writ Large
“This design is from an American quilt, which I blew up to become the scale of tiles in the spirit of 19th-century oilcloth floor coverings,” says designer David Netto of this East Hampton foyer. “I love this floor because it makes a tiny, pinched space with no light the most exciting space in the house.”
5) A Palatial Welcome
In a Philadelphia vestibule and adjoining corridor, designer Bennett Weinstock and decorative painter Dianne Warner borrowed circular inlay patterning from Catherine the Great’s Pavlovsk Palace. For the empirical feat of faux-bois, Warner replicated the effect of 12 woods for a masterful dupe that could fool Catherine herself.
6) Diamonds in the Rough
“Painted floors only get better with age,” says decorator Heather Chadduck Hillegas. When renovating her century-old Colonial home in Birmingham, Alabama, she grounded her all-white kitchen in a twist on classic black-and-white diamonds, then had the artist distress it before the finish coat was applied. "An instant classic!”
7) Jefferson’s Lawn Party
Is it any wonder an inveterate naturalist would chase a “true grass-green” to tread upon indoors? Thomas Jefferson wasted no time swathing his entrance hall at Monticello in the shade coined by portraitist Gilbert Stuart, who mixed up a sample of the verdant hue on the spot when the statesman visited his home.
8) Mod About Chevron
At this Connecticut estate, decorator Ashley Whittaker enlisted decorative painter Chris Pearson to overlay the dark-stained floor on the dining room with chevron bands of white. The combination recalls a room by Albert Hadley that Whittaker says she and her client had “both been in love with for years.”
Here, a look at 8 designer examples of how a painted floor can transform an entire room.