When choosing the kind of flooring for your home, it is important to consider the patterns and colors at work in the room. If you already have colorful walls, bold furniture, and patterned throw pillows, you should choose flooring that is more subtle and muted. On the other hand, if your walls are bland and furniture is basic, jazz it up with a herringbone pattern for your hardwood flooring, or add interest by creating a patterned tile design.

Colour is a subtle yet critical element of design. The power it has to shape the way we feel about a room is almost magical. Used properly, the right color combinations can foster productivity, cheerfulness, creativity, and energy, thus transforming a room from a mere space into an experience. It is a known fact that every element around us has some form of positive and negative cosmic energy. The fact doesn’t change for the floorings of a home either. Vastu Shastra for flooring suggests that a combination of color, pattern, material, and design can bring stability and harmony to the occupant’s life.

Choosing the Right Colour

Colour accounts for 60 percent of our emotional response to a room. When selecting the flooring for your home or office, your color choices will impact the energy level, mood, and productivity of everyone in the space.

Green is a great flooring color choice for people who sit in front of a computer for long periods, and its soothing quality makes it ideal for nearly any room. It causes the least amount of eyestrain and is mentally associated with nature, which is calming. Green is tranquil, invigorating, restful, and balancing.

Like green, blue is a calming color that represents stability and recalls the beauty of nature. It is believed to be able to lower blood pressure by invoking a sense of calm and peace, and it promotes clear thinking.

Use yellow to promote a positive, cheerful, friendly work environment. Yellow activates memory, stimulates the nervous system, promotes communication, and sparks creativity. It is welcoming, sunny, associated with happiness and health, and works well to brighten up darker areas such as stairways and corridors. Yellow is a powerful color and should be used in moderation since in large amounts it can be over-stimulating.

The color of passion, red, is associated with high energy and an elevated heart rate. It is passionate, daring, and stimulates the appetite. Since it can provoke such a strong mental reaction, it should be used sparingly in a business setting. Given that red has the potential to result in anxious, high-stress employees, it is best confined to areas where they don’t spend too much time, like hallways and bathrooms.

Neutral colors are useful for calming and balancing a space, but they carry little emotional appeal. While they are good, basic, safe choices, overusing white, gray, and beige can have adverse effects on an individual’s psyche.

Choosing the Right Material

White marble, granite, and Italian marble are good choices as they enhance a peaceful atmosphere. Wooden floorings can also be used and laid in the north, northeast, or east direction of the house. Care must be taken to have proper leveling done and avoid nails to fix the wooden planks. This will hamper the health and wealth factor of the family.

Maintaining the Balance

• Use natural stones as the energy fields are positively activated. It also ensures a constant flow of energy as opposed to the synthetic option. Marble is another wonderful stone to use. It’s not only evergreen but when used in hues of white, it brightens up the space and helps open up smaller areas.
• For dark walls, it’s a great idea to use white or off-white marble as it offsets the tones to create a perfect balance.
• To lend a softer feel to a lounge room or dining area, wooden flooring is perfect. It doesn’t dominate the space and at the same time brings a lot of warmth to the house. Wooden flooring also helps to demarcate zones and is a wonderful way to divide space. The zones best suited for wooden flooring are South and East. However keep in mind if the flooring is in a dark wood, keep the walls as light as possible.
• When wood is used on the staircase, connecting one floor to the other, it is considered auspicious as it brings prosperity and growth to the occupants of the house.
• Red natural stones such as red bricks are perfect to use in small doses in the southern zones of the house. It imparts the energy of fire and helps in bringing recognition and fame to the residents.
• Yellow stones, especially the ones that look heavy, are perfect for the southwest zone of the house. If you have an open area in this zone such as a courtyard or a balcony, feel free to use the yellow stone.
• Refrain from using wall-to-wall carpeting as it doesn’t allow the energy to move freely, making it sluggish and sickly. Also, do not use carpets with too much of an abstract print as it confuses the flow of energy, taking away the peace and decorum. Expensive carpets and rugs with fine detailing are a safe bet in small doses so are woolen carpets, but use them sparingly.
• Cracked floors near the entrance or at the foot of the staircase or chipped flooring takes away prosperity. So, get it fixed as soon as possible.

No matter which color or material you choose for your floorings as per Vastu, the key element to remember is to maintain cleanliness. If the floors are clean and hygienic, abundance will follow your way.