This Designer Cracked the Code on Making Gray Floors Look Incredible (No Reno Required!)

Gray vinyl flooring is one of those details that just screams “builder-grade home.” These vinyl floors are almost always paired with gray walls, gray countertops, gray kitchen cabinets — you get the idea. They’re not the coziest of flooring choices, and that can be a huge bummer if you’re trying to pull together a cozy living space as a renter on a budget.

So what can you do to work with these gray floors if you can’t change them? The answer isn’t necessarily to cover all of them up, surprisingly. Solutions lie in dressing up your home in complementary choices — ideas that you may have overlooked, according to an interior designer who took to Instagram to prove her point. You have to think critically about your decor and visual lines of sight.

Interior designer Emily Henderson, who has also built a lifestyle empire via one-million-plus Instagram followers, recently shared a makeover completed by partners at Mallory Interiors, run by Mallory Wackerman. The main challenge Wackerman faced was warming up her client’s gray-washed space, anchored by gray vinyl flooring. Besides changing the paint color of the room, she used a few additional techniques to make the gray vinyl planks virtually disappear without renovating.

Here’s how you can do the same in your own space — follow along as we share Henderson and Wackerman’s four specific tips for making gray flooring work, alongside real interiors that nail the look.

This may be the most obvious and effective way to banish any dreary vibes that large swaths of gray flooring can result in. Choose a large rug with warmer tones to both offset and mask the coolness of the gray. A decorative rug instantly draws attention away from the flooring underneath; if you choose a rug with a plusher pile, as Mallory did, you’ll be adding even more soft and cozy vibes to the space.

Just because your flooring mimics a cool-toned wood, that doesn’t mean you have to carry the same wood tone throughout the entire room. Emily notes that adding wood furniture in warmer, richer hues will effectively cancel out the gray. “Matching” the gray will only make the space feel colder and more one-dimensional.

Just like the area rug tip, do even more to distract. “We added in floating shelves and put dowels in between them to make them feel more custom,” Emily wrote in her post. The floating shelves reach all the way to the ceiling, which effectively brings the eye up and away from the floor. And filling the shelves with personal, colorful items adds even more charm and personality to a once-bland and boring space.

However, because the gray flooring is indeed still there, you’ll want to tie it in in some capacity to avoid making it feel totally random (which could make it stick out like a sore thumb even more). 

In the space Mallory designed, she added a gray upholstered desk chair to do just that. But you could bring the gray in through wall art, throw blankets, pillows, or even metallic accents like knobs, curtain rods, or metallic furniture.

Gray vinyl flooring doesn’t have to cramp your style. Disguise it, distract from it, and make it fit your style using these tips — you might just forget that it exists in your space at all!