Painting the floor creates separate ‘rooms’ without walls
Interior designer Emily Henderson said she felt blessed with a blank canvas when she was asked to design a workspace for her friend, designer and blogger Joy Cho.
But Cho’s 1,200-square-foot Hollywood office was not without its challenges. She needed the open space to be multifunctional, acting as a design studio, blog studio, photo studio, administrative office and meeting area for clients of her company, Oh Joy!
How to divide the space without compartmentalizing it into separate rooms? “It needed to be broken up in a really open way, with just implied separation of space,” Henderson said.
PHOTO GALLERY: Before and after, the floor transformation
In a clever solution that readers can duplicate at home, Henderson created separate areas by painting the plywood floor different gray and white stripes.
The floor was in poor shape and needed a makeover. Because Cho wanted the room to feel like “a grown-up Candy Land with lots of color,” Henderson felt the floor needed to be neutral.
“We wanted to do a crazy pattern,” she said, “but ultimately we decided to do something on the safe side because we were going to add so much color.”
Henderson outlined a pattern and then colored it in. She chose two neutral tones in different widths at different angles. The board room has one stripe pattern, the photo room another and the office space was painted solid gray for a little relief. Henderson said she designed the patterns in a way that made them fairly easy to change; lines could be elongated if necessary.
After the room had been painted with a white floor coat, Henderson and assistants taped the designs in a few hours. A painter (at a cost of $1,200) then sprayed two coats of gray, let that dry for 48 hours, then applied a final coat of polyurethane.
Henderson is quick to note that this type of design is a temporary fix for beat-up floors or a carport or garage where the floor isn’t pristine.
“It is not meant to last for 20 years,” she said. “It’s more of a three- to five-year solution. It might start chipping, but we didn’t care. That’s why we didn’t choose a crazy pattern or color. We didn’t want something that would stand out.”
The painter used a sprayer, but Henderson said the paint could be rolled on. The pattern makes rugs unnecessary, and the gray hides some of the daily dirt. “It’s just busy enough that it hides imperfections,” Henderson said.
Twitter: @lisaboone19
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