Flooring

Small but beautiful – flooring spaces

The interior design opportunities offered by the smallest rooms are often ignored. But tiny hallways, dark boxrooms and narrow loos are now the focus for designers who like to specialise in the richest, most elaborate wallpapers, tiles and flooring. The most cramped rooms, filled with deep colour and surrealist pattern, are unleashing the Mad Hatter in us all.

“I’m taking over the world one downstairs loo at a time,” said Louise Wakefield of Beware the Moon, the new design house she created in partnership with her dad. She contends that the feature wall has had its day: “Now I want to see my designs in completely papered tiny rooms, nice and busy, like wallpaper should be.”

Flooring plays a crucial role in small-space decorating. Long, narrow, striped or patterned rubber floor tiles can lengthen a hallway, and wide stripes make small  rooms look more spacious. Something on the lines of the modern classic studded rubber floor tiles (500mm x 500mm, £8.99; 085451 24 24 10, ukflooringonline.com). The truly adventurous looking to add sparkle to a dingy room should check out the new hammered-metal briquettes from De Ferranti in glowing gold (10cm x 30cm, £499 per sq metre; 020 7384 4424, deferranti.com). Or, perhaps, a silver floor in engineered oak from the Salsa collection by Tarkett (Silver Star, £60 per sq metre; 01622 854151, tarkett-floors.com).

Tags: floor tiles, rubber flooring