The wood flooring industry, like product design and fashion, has ebbs and flows in style and trends. The pendulum swings to one side and, given enough time, it then swings to the other. With the speed of modern manufacturing and global production, these shifts occur over several years and flooring manufacturers can decide to stay in step or to keep producing the same products they always have.
Real Wood Floors has positioned themselves largely at the forefront of design and style by keeping one foot on the edge of current trends and the other foot positioned to continue providing popular styles which stand the test of time. We take great pride in making a variety of options available to our flooring customers.
Sam Cobb, our CEO and Scott Gill, our Sales Director, talk about the current state of floors at the company and what the near future holds.
“We’ve been making several collections to meet longstanding needs in the market, styles that are established all throughout the country. We’ve also always wanted to make on-design floors available for most end users to afford. We think any homeowner should be able to afford a quality and beautiful floor,” said Gill. Cobb adds, “The wide plank, perfectly imperfect style is going to be around for a long time but we’re starting to hear interest in new directions. Warmer tones, narrower widths, higher grades and smoother textures may soon be around the corner.”
A good example of staying on-trend is leveraging new technologies to produce texture heavy flooring options. Our recent collection, Longhouse Plank, features four unique textures; genuine hand scraping, wire-brushed grain, circle saw marks, and band saw marks. We also use 7 1/2” and 3 1/2” wide boards in each box. This floor style didn’t abruptly occur on its own. It was a stylistic evolution, coupled with continued advancements in manufacturing techniques, which grew over several years.
The last few years have seen an explosion in neutral color offerings for flooring. Shades of grays and whites have been introduced and continue to be received well. Our Steadfast Collection, made primarily of variations of gray tones, have seen a welcome response across the country. Yet, are the golden browns and red hues of decades past going to see a resurgence? We’ll see soon enough.