Interior Products Review: FlooringVintage Beauty: Wide-plank wood floors with dark stains are dressing up every room of the house.

The solid hardwood floor in interior designer Corine Gulli's kitchen looks as if her kids and dogs have worn it out. The truth is, it's brand new.

"I've got two words for what's really hot right now in hardwoods: dark and distressed," says Gulli, a designer at Interior Specialist, a Carlsbad, Calif., firm whose 57 home builder clients include Pulte Homes, Barrett Homes, and Pacer Communities.

Wide planks stained in shades of chocolate or ebony and hand-scraped into affected antiquity are underfoot in homes from California, where floor trends typically begin, to New York.

For Gulli, the factory-applied scrapes and dings, preserved under a sturdy aluminum-oxide finish that prevents the animals and children from adding obvious ones of their own, lend a "comfortable, warm, welcoming feel and fewer maintenance concerns. You don't have to be concerned about every nick or scratch that's going to occur," she says.

That attitude, says John Himes, director of hardwood business at Mannington Mills, reflects a more casual America whose homeowners are dressing down for work, buying time-saving products, and are less likely to live in super-formal homes than they were just a few years ago.

"Consumers in the last five years have really adopted a far more relaxed style," notes Himes. "Sometimes it's casual, but even the formal look is more of a relaxed formality. Consumers are looking for any product that can help them design around that trend."

Already-distressed wood, he notes, reveals less wear and tear than smooth-sanded, butterscotch-colored oak, a perennial flooring favorite. Kathy Gorski, owner of Belmont Carpets and Wood Flooring in Anaheim, Calif., agrees. "They want the look of wood, but they want to be carefree about it. They don't want to worry about getting a scratch on it. With a distressed floor, if you get a scratch on it, it adds more character."

Like teenagers who drop a fortune on brand-new blue jeans that come from the store faded and torn, homeowners are paying up to 20 percent more for the scuffs and scrapes that give their new floors a vintage look.

"This look has come to middle America," says John Stern, president of Kentucky Wood Floors. Sara Babinski, principal designer for hardwood at Armstrong, agrees: "The word on the West Coast is that it is not going away. I think it will be strong for a long time, especially in metro areas."

Same goes for deep brown and almost-black floors, achieved by laying naturally dark merbau, black walnut, or wenge or by washing lighter-colored oak or maple with deep chocolate or near-black stains. Gorski notes that her customers "look at and like" the pitch-dark floor samples, but are buying dark browns instead. "They're afraid of it being too dark," she says. "It's like trying to sell the old white wash: If it's very white or very dark, it shows more as far as scratching. So they step back to something that's not quite so dark."