Hardwood floors are a divine choice for modern homes. Available in a range of colors and wood styles, from white oak and burnt orange hickory to elegant cherry red and smokey walnut, it’s modern, desirable, and utterly timeless. Wood flooring of any kind is highly versatile for the home, but certain wall colors match certain wood undertones the best.
Keep reading to learn the best hardwood floor and wall color combinations and trends in 2024.
Best Hardwood Floor and Wall Color Combinations
Red Hardwood Floors
We recommend warmer colors, like yellows, light to medium blues, off-whites, greens, and grays.
Walnut and red oak hardwood floors have a reddish-brown undertone, which perfectly complements bold or neutral wall colors.
When pairing red hardwood flooring with a more neutral color, like pale yellow, light blue, and gray, choose dark or wooden furnishings to create contrast.
If choosing a darker wall color, like medium blue, block yellow, or green, any furnishings will complement the wall-floor combination. Both white furniture and shelving or dark couches and rugs give the room a cozy vibe.
Brown Hardwood Floors
We recommend neutral or block colors, like dark grays, browns, blues, beiges, and off-whites.
Brown hardwood flooring offers a deeply natural look to the home. With a darker undertone, it creates an illusion of space in smaller rooms and adds coziness to larger spaces.
When matching brown hardwood with lighter walls, like beiges and off-whites, it accentuates the floor space, making the room look larger and airier. If pairing the floor with darker wall colors, like dark gray, navy, or brown, it creates an unrivaled intimacy, regardless of the room size.
Gray Hardwood Floors
We recommend cooler colors, like greens, teals, light and dark blues, grays, white, beige, and brown.
Gray hardwood is a popular choice for modern homes. Available in light and dark wood variations, gray floors are highly versatile, matching almost any wall color.
A lighter gray hardwood floor tends to pair best with lighter wall colors, like light blue, light gray, off-white, or green-gray. Darker or heavily grained gray flooring suits a bolder wall color the best, like teal, dark blue, taupe, or brown.
Natural Hardwood Floors
We recommend bold, block colors, like plum, dark berry, ruby red, navy blue, emerald green, mint green, dusty orange, and dark brown.
Light brown hardwood floors are a timeless classic for the home. Arguably the most popular flooring color in 2024, it’s highly desirable and renowned for its ability to suit any wall paint color.
Darker wall paint creates the perfect contrast for rooms with natural hardwood floors. Even block or bold colors, like red wine or plum, frame the room and create depth. Lighter wall colors open up the space and accentuate natural light. These neutral tones suit any colored finishings, from white or wood to block colors.
Orange Hardwood Floors
We recommend navy, white and off-white, browns, black, dark gray, and sage greens.
A deeper burnt orange undertone is characteristic of flooring with an amber oil-based finish. You can find this in prefinished hardwood styles, such as Gunstock and Biscayne Bay. This color hardwood is highly versatile and can be matched with almost any wall-floor color combination. Warmer colors work best with this rustic colored flooring, like browns, sage greens, dark grays, navy, and even black.
Black Hardwood Floors
We recommend navy, dark gray, light gray, and white.
Black hardwood floors create a unique intimacy in any room. The dark wood undertones accentuate the grains. While often used in larger rooms to create more intimacy, smaller spaces can also benefit from dark hardwood.
Dark flooring often pairs well with darker walls. The combination adds modern elegance and sophistication, particularly when paired with dark brown or black furnishings. Yet this can make spaces without significant natural light appear sullen.
In rooms with limited window space, lighter wall colors, like light gray and white, suit best, particularly when paired with mid-to-dark furniture.
White Hardwood Floors
We recommend any light or dark color walls, like black, navy, greens, blues, browns, orange, yellows, and off-white.
When pairing lighter wall colors with lighter floors, the aesthetic can appear too bright, making the room look empty and washed out. Splashes of color can be added by accessorizing in the right way. Cushions, rugs, and wall art in block colors, like yellow, green, and blue, work best. Plants also offer contrast to break up the light.
Darker wall colors, like navy, greens, blues, browns, and blacks, with white hardwood floors complement each other well. Add dark wood furniture, black couches, and dark rugs for a dramatic effect, or explore lighter furnishings, in white or natural wood, to add delicacy and class.Â
Greige Hardwood Floors
We recommend neutral or block colors, like light brown, green, blue, off-white, light gray, or yellow.
Greige hardwood flooring is growing in popularity, fast becoming the most popular floor for modern homes. It’s the perfect alternative to gray flooring for folk who love that sleek-gray look in their home. With cool and light wood effects streaking through the grayish grains, greige flooring is best suited to neutral and block colors. Being a lighter flooring, any color furnishings suit, including wood, metal, glass, and white furniture.
FAQs
Should Walls Be Darker or Lighter Than Floors?
As a general rule, walls should be lighter than the flooring color. This adds a brighter, more neutral feel to the room. Yet it all depends on personal preference. Dark wall colors, like navy, taupe, and even black, can complement a light or dark wood floor.
When using darker colors with a darker colored floor, like brown, red, burnt orange, dark gray, or black, painting just one wall in a block color creates the perfect combination of light, depth, and color. Other walls can be painted in a neutral tone, like off-white or light gray, to complement the aesthetic.
What Color Goes With Oak Flooring?
Oak flooring is highly versatile and can be paired with any wall color. Generally, lighter, more neutral colors work best with the undertones found in oak flooring, like white, off-white, beige, apricot, light brown, sage green, and gray.
Darker wall colors, like black or brown, can match oak flooring, but it’s recommended the accessories (like couches, shelving, and ornaments) are lighter to add more depth to the space.
Conclusion
Hardwood flooring is an investment. Choosing to install it in your home is a statement within itself. Pairing hardwood with the right wall colors, like these hardwood floor and wall color combinations, can accentuate its unique grain and make it the feature it demands to be!
Considering hardwood flooring in your home? Compare the best styles and colors in your room of choice with our room visualizer!
