5 Awesome Flooring Designs

These are 5 of the coolest flooring designs. From an optical illusion floor, to a floor made of pennies, an etched floor and even an interactive floor, this design collection has it all!

Optical Illusion Floor

This optical illusion carpet, spotted in a Paris video game store, provides an illusion of a vortex floor.

Leather Belt Floor

(Belt) strapped for cash? Forget ‘affordable’ for a minute and just imagine the curious combination of feeling aged leather beneath your feet, and the look of vintage belts lining the floors of your home. Leather flooring is fairly unusual, but these upcycled belt designs are unique – each one hand-crafted and with individually-selected old belts.

OK, but the price? Over 600 dollars for the round mat shown above from BranchHome and over 70 dollars per square foot for the floor tiles from Ting.

Penny Floor

A floor literally tiled with thousands of copper pennies… it’s pretty surprising to look down and see them when you walk into The Standard Grill in The Standard Hotel, New York. The design was selected by the restaurant’s designers, Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch of New York design firm – Roman and Williams.

Radiant Heat Floor

Take off your shoes and feel the warmth coming up through that radiant heat flooring. It’s not only one of the coolest ways to get warm (no pun intended), but it’s also really energy efficient because, unlike traditional heating systems, you don’t lose the heat. With traditional baseboard heating or forced hot air heating, a lot of the energy you use to heat your home is wasted because much of the heat produced is immediately lost. But with radiant floors, that warmth is transferred directly to you as you come in contact with the floor. And it takes advantage of something we all know – hot air rises – so when the heat is generated underneath the floor, it does what it’s supposed to, which is go directly up. Aside from the fact that it keeps your indoor temperature up, and your heating bills down, it’s just plain fantastic.

Salt Floor

Every once in a while, though, we run across someone who has taken the industry to a whole new level. Japanese Artist Motoi Yamamoto has found his medium in grains of salt – billions and billions of them. Yamamoto adheres plain table salt to floor surfaces, creating extremely intricate patterns & landscapes. The result is pretty amazing and can be a dizzying optical illusion if you stare too long. To prep, the artist draws the most complex mazes and labyrinths imaginable, plotting out his design.

His creations are for exhibition only and aren’t meant for permanent floor design, which is fortunate, because it’d take just one mildly rude friend to undo hours upon hours of work.