Hardwood Floors April May 2018

The Evolution of Hardwood (Continued)

blue for reliability, and gray for safe and non-threatening career colors. e grays and navy blues in fashion were so new that the surrounding segments of shoes and accessories had to run to catch up with the clothing. e same changes occurred in the interiors market. Many designers had been let go or had evolved from residential to commercial interiors, taking with them their tastes and strengths. Meet your new best friend, neutral gray, and get to know it because it’s not going away and will be staying for a while. With this in ux of gray, we saw a tidal wave of looks and visuals in furnishings and ooring to match. Without a doubt, we all fell in love with the looks of Restoration Hardware. Practically everyone received the stacks of massive catalogs beautifully designed to showcase the practicality and beauty of greige, reclaimed wood, and rustic metallics. We saw ooring in these shelter catalogs that looked di erent from those in our homes of that time, all of a sudden creating an urge to update our looks, nally moving homeowners to make an investment in their homes that they’d fought hard to keep from losing during the housing bubble, and held tightly to their budgets for as long as possible. e channels to pay a ention to had gone from the builders market to retail replacement. Not suddenly, but eventually, we had homeowners looking for higher- end materials for their homes that they’d decided they not only

the color, style, and design of ooring. Large parts of the ooring products were going into the builder’s design showrooms, and as homeowners built homes to be ipped, they worked with materials like travertine and travertine nocce, which was matched perfectly to the carpeting and hardwood ooring. Hardwood in those days had expanded from the gunstock strip to hand-scraped looks. e scraped looks became “the big thing” as it o ered homeowners and designers something di erent and new that they had not seen before in ooring options. is innovation served as a catalyst for other similar changes across the other ooring categories. We saw Berber ecks and heathered tweeds introduced in carpeting and a lessening of gloss and shine of the bers. All of these colors fell within the neutral zone of warm golden- and red-based beiges. In hardwood, it was frequently called cider. Once the hand-scraped looks were knocked o by the cheap look-alikes, eventually and slowly, consumers started looking for something new. at is until the recession hit and all bets were o . We hit the pause bu on on our taste evolution except to say we all migrated to the safe zones. Consumer big investments moved from home improvements to wardrobe improvements to maintain much-needed jobs in a tough market or to interview for new jobs. Wardrobes became a mix of black, navy

were happy to own, but also wanted to make very personal choices of ways to upgrade its interior.

“Meet your new best friend, neutral gray, and get to know it because it’s not going away and will be staying for a while.”

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