Often seen in the kitchen or bathroom, a checkered floor can also glam it up with a glossy finish in a statement entryway or tone it down in a muted bedroom. Mixing up the color, scale and materials creates endless variations on the original black and white. After all, any pattern that works in both the Uffizi gallery in Florence and the Simpsons' cartoon kitchen has to be called a classic.
TOP ROW:
1. Classic floors meet classic chairs (Mackle Construction via Houzz).
2. Glossy checks contrast with gorgeous green in this entry (Elizabeth Dinkel Designs).
3. An all-white kitchen is grounded by black and white (Grand House Design).
4. Plain wood floors are upgraded with bright painted checks (Frederick + Frederick Architects via Houzz).
5. Oversize checks make the room feel like a charming dollhouse (Amy Renea via Houzz).
BOTTOM ROW:
6. Muted grey is a softer version of the classic look (cote de texas).
7. Exposed brick and checks are a double dose of classic (House Call: Laura & Eric's Adams Morgan Condo via Apartment Therapy).
8. Checks go neutral for the laundry room. (Patterson Construction Corporation via Houzz).
9. Blue on blue is simple but powerful (Flickr member Lara604 licensed under Creative Commons).
10. Black and white checks replace a runner in a classic hallway (Brownhouse Design via Houzz).
(Images: As linked above)
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Love the checkered floors!
Is it just me, or do the diagonal ones always look better?
These photos make me glad that I laid my yellow and white marmoleum floor in my kitchen on the diagonal. It just takes it to the next level.
IMHO, high contrast floors like checkerboard require a large area to work. Otherwise, it's visual noise in a small space, which never works for me. Same goes for high contrast paint jobs. Generally, you need enough distance in a room to visually organize high contrast, and unless you live in a mansion, you probably don't. Yes, a good design can break this rule to good effect, but most of us can't quite pull it off.
Yes, diagonal is better.
A couple of lessons to be gleaned here: (1) Don't use a fisheye lens or whatever that is in #7 that makes the area at right seem dizzying and disorienting. (2) Checkerboard is assertive; colored checkerboard, as in #4, goes beyond "assertive" to "bold"; pattern-within-a-pattern colored patchwork checkerboard, as in #9, goes beyond "bold" to "too much."
I WILL have checkerboard floors one day before I die.
Love them. Love them. Love them.
There's nothing more classic than a black and white checkered kitchen floor - the great thing about it is it can work in any space, traditional to modern by the way you design around it!
Very nice article on floors. I do greatly prefer the black and white floors to those of gray and white or other colors, but enjoyed seeing all these rooms.
In most cases, I think a checkerboard floor looks better with a solid border -- perhaps half or two-thirds as wide as the checkers. It improves the transition to adjacent non-checkered floors, and allows one to avoid funny, tiny triangles at the edges of the pattern.