Hardwood Floors April May 2018

INDUSTRY INSIGHTS DESIGNER INSIGHTS

By Emily Morrow Finkell

THE EVOLUTION OF HARDWOOD Amazing Trends that Will Reinspire Your Love for Authentic Wood

Our tastes and appetites have expanded along with our digital abilities to see the world, experience world cultures, and to lurk into the living spaces of our social media friends. One cannot unsee something they like online, and thanks to the technological advances of digital media, we can “ nd” and “follow” the things we like more easily. From the days of solid, glossy, thin, gunstock planks to today’s wider, longer, ma e, barn wood gray boards, homes have also changed in size. I referenced the McMansions of the 1990s and early 2000s because they were being built on spec and ipped just before our housing bubble burst. When this was happening, I was practicing interior design in custom built luxury o ces and homes and eventually transitioned to leading

Understanding hardwood trends requires a high level of awareness of what is being shown in multiple places and sources. It’s a never-ending cycle if you are a trend spo er. Twenty-plus years ago, hardwood ooring was mainly produced in narrow strip gunstock, red oak in high gloss nishes, and was found on the oors of McMansions and spec homes all across the U.S. at was then, and this is now. What has transpired since has been nothing less than warp-speed innovations and changes, some due in part to all of the global and economic ups and downs, political changes, and even trade agreements. What we can deduce is that the market has been ooded with endless wood

look-alikes. For this article, I will remove all the various and continually expanding categories that look like wood, and just address what is identi ed as genuine wood. Wood looks began morphing a er the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, around 2008 and 2009. If we created a timeline of this transition, it would also include runway fashion collections in various parts of the world that began to include gray and gray-beige, and no red or reddish-orange. It gradually went from high gloss to medium gloss, to now our ma e nish. I’ve said it many times: if we stay in an industry long enough, you can see the pendulum swing one way, and eventually, it will swing back, always with some modernizations made to improve the original versions.

Photos courtesy of Emily Morrow Finkell

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