Interior Products Review: Laminate FlooringNew Frontiers: Sales soar with improved durability and expanded styles.

After installing ceramic floors in foyers for more than two years, Adams & Marshall Homes' construction manager Sonny Sears tired of spending up to $2,000 per home to replace damaged tiles when the newly poured concrete subfloor would crack, breaking the ceramic that lay on top.

So the production builder started laying laminate floors—designed to look like ceramic tiles, complete with grout lines—in the foyers. “The ceramic absorbs all the energy from the concrete [as it settles], and the laminate absorbs no energy,” says Sears. “From a service standpoint, we're saving so much money it's unbelievable.”

Nearly as dramatic is the ballooning interest in laminate floors, which five years ago accounted for less than 100 million square feet in sales and this year will top 1 billion feet, according to industry estimates. A mainstay of the remodeling industry, laminate flooring burst onto the residential market in the late 1980s—just before BUILDING PRODUCTS was founded—and became popular here a few years later when Scandinavian superstore IKEA began selling Pergo planks to do-it-yourselfers.

Builders of new homes, like Adams & Marshall Homes, are warming to the one-time problem child of flooring as manufacturers make it more resistant to moisture and design locking panels that don't require glue for installation.

“What happened with laminates has been just phenomenal,” says Steve Bunch, director of sales for Columbia Flooring. “It's one of the most technologically advanced products I have ever seen.”

He adds: “The installation problems have been completely resolved.”

Indeed, some builders, including Scott Redmond of San Francisco-based Clever Homes, encourage their buyers to install the floors themselves because it's so easy.

“We will give them a waiver because it's a product that's pretty easy to do,” he says. “An installer can come in and give them a half-hour intro and talk to them so they can get started,” he says.

Laminate planks are made with processed wood chips from replenishable species, like pine, which have been ground to dust. The wood fibers are mingled with resins to make the product moisture resistant. That mixture is pressed at high pressure and heat to make a board, which is overlayed with paper that bears the likeness of the wood, slate, or tile that the flooring intends to mimic. The paper is impregnated with melamine for structural stability, and then overlaid with a wear layer that resists scratches, dents, and everyday wear and tear.

Most manufacturers warranty their products for 20 to 30 years—even against moisture damage, a move unheard of when the product began making its way into American homes a decade or so ago.