Expert advice - vinyl flooring
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Vinyl flooring is becoming increasingly popular in modern homes, with a huge choice of finish from bright tiles to a wooden look. It is also extremely hardwearing which makes it a great option throughout your home, particularly if you have children or pets. To understand more about vinyl flooring, we catch up with Alice Dunbar, Marketing & Interiors Specialist, at Harvey Maria.
Love Renovate: Luxury vinyl is becoming increasingly popular in hallways and kitchens. What are the benefits over other materials?
Alice: Luxury vinyl tiles offer a huge number of benefits for anyone looking to design a space that's equally beautiful and practical. Extremely easy to clean and maintain, good quality vinyl flooring is both highly durable and much more hygienic than other materials, making it a great choice for high footfall areas such as hallways, and practical spaces including kitchens and bathrooms. Unlike other hard floor coverings such as ceramic and wood, vinyl feels comfortable and warm underfoot as well as being much less slippery. Most importantly, vinyl offers a wonderful array of stunning colours and designs to help you to create a space that's perfect for your home. From a rainbow of shades to striking patterns seen in our designer collaborations with Dee Hardwicke, Neisha Crosland & Cath Kidston, you can mix and match designs freely for a bespoke floor that's truly unique.
Love Renovate: How long will luxury vinyl last in my home?
Alice: High grade vinyl tiles are incredibly durable. Unlike vinyl on a roll, they are too rigid to roll up, making them ideal for use in spaces with heavy footfall as they are easy to maintain and incredibly long-lasting with no chance of ripping or tearing - some collections can have a lifetime of 15 years or more. Not only brilliant for domestic use, vinyl tiles are a fantastic choice for demanding commercial areas such as restaurants and shopping centres, which just goes to show quite how hardwearing it can be.
Love Renovate: How much should I expect to pay per metre squared for vinyl flooring?
Alice: The price of vinyl can be very varied depending on lots of different factors, but it's generally true that - in terms of quality - you really do get what you pay for. Our Luxury Vinyl Tile prices start at £33 per square metre, which is a reflection of the exceptional quality of our product. Cheaper vinyls will be much more flexible, and the more flexible the floor, the more likely it is to rip and tear over time. Luxury Vinyl Tiles are too rigid to roll up, meaning that they are far more durable and long-lasting than any product available in a roll format. At Harvey Maria we put design first, so our print and colour quality is extremely high and the images are sharp. A lower quality design will be less detailed and you may find that the colour is less precise or prone to fading over time, easily throwing off the scheme of your entire space.
Dee Hardwicke ‘Lattice' Vinyl Floor Tile in Hellebore from Harvey Maria
Love Renovate: Vinyl flooring is having a huge resurgence. What makes the new vinyl different to what has previously been laid in bathrooms?
Alice: At Harvey Maria, we've seen a shift where, rather than carpeting their homes everywhere except the kitchen, people are choosing hard flooring (vinyl included!) throughout their entire house. Propelled by this shift, the design capabilities of vinyl flooring have developed and increased, meaning that the patterns and colours available are now incredibly contemporary and in keeping with modern trends. Vinyl was chosen for bathrooms because it is hardwearing, easy to clean and generally very functional, and modern luxury vinyl tiles still retain these desirable qualities. Vinyl has the ability to be used in any room of the home, but the range of colours and designs available mean that it's possible to create different effects in each room. The floor in general has now become an important part of the overall design of a room, and the wide range of designs available makes it the perfect material.
In term of the material’s development, vinyl has gone from relatively basic and limited to a hugely versatile range of colours and decorative patterns. Vinyl design has changed considerably in recent years. Improvements in manufacturing have seen a higher level of design quality and clarity, a more environmentally friendly approach with vinyl now being recyclable, and the removal of harmful elements found in older vinyl floors. Vinyl can now be used to provide a natural look, in the form of wood, stone and ceramic effect designs. The result is incredibly authentic, whilst being far easier to maintain, more durable and safer than the real thing. Harvey Maria goes one step further to stay at the forefront of design creativity on a product that is still predominantly limited to natural-looking floors.
Love Renovate: Are there any trends emerging currently?
Alice: Zoning open plan spaces using flooring is set to become a big trends in our homes - To define and add a sense of purpose to open-plan living spaces, flooring can be split into 'zones', stylishly defined using a number of complementary patterns and colours. You are likely to find that natural zones will occur in the home - one end of the living room may lend itself to a children's play area, for example, or perhaps the breakfast table sits in the sunniest part of the kitchen? Letting these zones influence your home's interior is a brilliant way to ensure that everything feels balanced, natural, and totally bespoke. Harvey Maria's Signature collection has been developed around the concept of 'unified design', incorporating designer patterns, plain colours and wood effect tiles that can be combined freely to create a completely unique space.
In larger open-plan spaces, such as a combined kitchen and dining room or even a studio apartment, flooring zones are a beautiful alternative to partition walls or room dividers. They serve a very similar purpose, whilst retaining a space's desirable open-plan properties and helping it appear larger as a result. As well as defining zones in one open-plan space, you can apply the same technique between connecting rooms, harmonising your décor so that it flows seamlessly through your home. I'd recommend choosing one key colour or wood effect floor, and using this as a carrier for areas of pattern and colour. For example, laying down Harvey Maria's Antique Oak in the hallway, and continuing this through to an adjoining dining space as a border around a pattern such as Dee Hardwicke's Lattice Hay Field. If the dining room then connects to a kitchen, Antique Oak could continue through, bordering a different pattern this time - perhaps Parquet Red Oxide by Neisha Crosland.
Premium Wood Vinyl in Church Pine from Harvey Maria
Love Renovate: What is the most popular look and finish?
Alice: Our range of Luxury Vinyl Tiles are available in a gorgeous range of designs with colours, effects and finishes to suit any space. Being a design-led company, our customers tend to be very creative, and our collaborations with British designers such as Cath Kidston, Neisha Crosland, & Dee Hardwicke include inspirational patterns that fill a room with personality. A huge trend in recent months has been to combine various LVT finishes to achieve a unique combination of pattern, colour, and texture. We've created a collection of Premium Wood effect tiles and solid coloured 'Little Bricks' that have been specifically designed to work in harmony with our designer collections. This makes it easy to create a bespoke floor design, define spaces, and create borders, for a floor that flows beautifully through your entire home.
Love Renovate: What preparation do you need to do before fitting the floor?
Alice: When installing a vinyl floor, it's important to first lay down a suitable subfloor rather than fitting directly on top of any existing flooring. Depending on a number of factors (e.g. the material and condition of the existing floor, whether you can add any extra height, the type of subfloor) the subfloor may be suitably installed on top of your current flooring. However, you might find that removing the existing flooring is a better option for your space. There are two main reasons why it's important that a suitable subfloor is installed before vinyl is fitted. Firstly, the laying surface must be completely smooth, level, and flat to ensure that the flooring can be fitted accurately, and that tiles can fit snugly together without gaps. The recommended subfloors are also absorbent, meaning that adhesive is able to bond properly, which is unlikely to be the case with a non-porous material such as existing flooring.
Love Renovate: Does the flooring require underlay?
Alice: Underlays are not generally required when fitting a vinyl floor, but it's advisable to speak to the individual manufacturer to check their recommendations.
Love Renovate: Can you install underfloor heating under luxury vinyl?
Alice: Luxury vinyl tiles work very well with underfloor heating as heat can easily get through the vinyl layer, providing a warm and comfortable feeling underfoot. We just recommend that our High Temperature adhesive is used, and that the tiles should not be heated over 27°C which is easily controlled through the power output. 27 degrees is the British standard maximum temperature for underfloor heating which is well within the tolerance for vinyl floors. As is the case for any flooring used with underfloor heating, setting it to a higher temperature may affect both the adhesive and the tiles themselves, and could impact on the safety of your home. We recommend contacting the manufacturer of your underfloor heating system for further details and advice specific to your floor.
Dee Hardwicke ‘Lattice' Vinyl Floor Tile in Peartree with Wood-Effect Vinyl Floor Tile in Sawn Oak from Harvey Maria
Love Renovate: Anything else I need to know about vinyl flooring?
Alice: Vinyl flooring is available in two main formats - a vinyl sheet on a roll, and a luxury vinyl tile. Tiles are available in a number of different shapes, which include squares and rectangles in different sizes, as well as 'plank' style tiles, which are excellent for creating a realistic wood effect floor. Both vinyl tiles and sheet vinyl are available in a wide range of patterns and colours, but tiles allow a far better print quality, meaning that the designs are clearer for a more luxurious finish.
Although sheet vinyl can be cheaper and provides a more seamless aesthetic, luxury vinyl tiles are generally far more durable as they won't rip or tear, and can last an incredibly long time with proper care and maintenance.
Laying a sheet vinyl involves working with a few large pieces of flooring, which must be cut precisely to fit the space. Tiles also need to be cut to fit the edges of a room, but are more user friendly as if a mistake is made, it only affects one tile as opposed to a whole sheet of flooring. Tiles are rigid, making them easy to cut and less prone to damage during the fitting process, as opposed to vinyl on a roll which can rip and tear more easily.
Published: April 23, 2018
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