Laminate Flooring Provides Exotic Looks With Convincing ConstructionDramatic Details

In a perfect world, you could install natural spalted maple flooring to make a dramatic design statement. The wood has a very dark, irregular grain pattern caused by natural decay for a look unlike any other. The problem is that if you actually walked on it, the boards might crumble to pieces.

Replicate that same wood with laminate flooring, however, and you'll have a durable surface with a unique appearance. "You can do a lot of things with laminate that you can't do with the real thing," notes Al Boulogne, product manager for laminate business at Mannington Mills, which makes laminate spalted maple flooring.

Laminate flooring manufacturers' ability to mimic exotic or hard-to-find wood species is just one reason their product is gaining market share and, until the housing slow-down, was showing double-digit annual growth. Technological innovations that make laminate look and feel more realistic also are driving sales, along with improved wear layers for added durability.

"It's the fastest-growing segment of Armstrong," says general manager of laminate Milton Goodwin, adding that the market shrunk about 5 percent to 8 percent in 2007 after years of progress.

Statistics from research firm The Freedonia Group's "Hard Surface Flooring" study, published last year, show that laminate flooring accounted for 26.3 percent of non-resilient flooring demand in 2006. The firm expects that figure to grow to 32.5 percent by 2011, and for overall laminate flooring demand to expand at close to 11 percent per year through 2011, faster than other types of hard-surface flooring.

Manufacturers and pros attribute the growth to swelling consumer interest, partly because the surfacing is being installed in more areas of the house. "The upstairs used to be always carpet," says Darren Braunstein, vice president of Worldwide Wholesale Floor Coverings, which has retail locations around New Jersey. Now, he says, more bedrooms sport hard surfaces such as laminate.

"The public has become much more concerned about hygiene, pollution in the air, and the resources needed to create a product," says Anthony Riggi, product manager for Abet Laminati Commercial Flooring, adding that carpet has taken the biggest hit from this trend.

Accurate Accents

Laminate flooring is set to step into the void left by carpet with more realistic textures, plank sizes, and appearances. In addition to wood-grain styles, slate and modular stone or tile are popular targets for laminate replicas. "In the big picture, realism is where it's at," says Don Cybalski, creative director for Pergo. In the newest laminate flooring, he says, "the color is more real, the picture is more real, the depth is more real."

In the most common type of laminate, which is made by fusing a decorative paper image to an MDF or HDF core board with a melamine plastic overlay, one of the most important advances Cybalski sees is in texture. A process called embossed-in-register, in which a metal plate stamps and presses a pattern into the floorboard, allows the texture to match its wood-grain or stone pattern. While the technology hit the market about five years ago, "now it's become expected," Cybalski says. "This is still a high-end technology, but it's filtered down to mid-end, even low-end products."

The evolution of the individual plank format has been even more important, states Mannington Mills' Boulogne. Whereas traditional laminate flooring comes in 8-inch-wide planks made to look like two or three strips of wood, some modern laminate features the same 5-inch-wide format as hardwood flooring. "It brought the category so much closer to realism," Boulogne says.