Continuous Flooring: One Floor Throughout, and Rooms That Breathe

Why continuous flooring creates space

The eye reads a room by its boundaries. Every line in the floor, every change of material, every threshold registers as a border. The more borders there are, the smaller and more fragmented an apartment feels.

One floor in all rooms removes those borders. The eye glides from the hallway into the living space and on to the window. The rooms stay what they are, but they visibly belong together.

The floor is the largest continuous surface in an apartment. Anyone who unifies it gains space without building a single extra square metre.

For our couple in the fourth district the effect is especially strong, because their rooms form an enfilade. With the double-leaf doors open you look through three rooms. With five floors, that axis looks like a patchwork. With a single floor, it becomes the calm backbone of the apartment. How such transitions work in principle is explained in our article on room transitions.

Beauty is only half the case, though. The other half is safety.

A floor without thresholds: more than a question of style

A floor without thresholds is not only more beautiful. It is safer and more practical, at any age.

• No trip hazards. Even a one-centimetre edge can become a problem in half-light.
• Easier routes. With a shopping trolley, suitcase, pram or, later, a walking frame, you move through the apartment without obstacles.
• Easier cleaning. Robot vacuums and mops cross the whole surface without catching on profiles.
• Fewer dirt edges. Dust collects in the joints of transition profiles.

For our couple this point decides a lot. They want to grow old in the apartment without it ever looking like a care home. How barrier-free living and good design go together is shown in our article on age-friendly living without the care-home look.

What doing nothing costs. The brass strips stay, and you learn their positions by heart. You step higher in the dark, carry the basket more carefully, and the vacuum stops at every door. None of it is dramatic. But it is a small daily tax on a home you wanted to feel light, and the day a visitor with a walker comes to dinner, it stops being small.

Where doors remain, a drop-down seal in the leaf replaces the classic threshold. It lowers onto the floor when the door closes and lifts as it opens, so the door stays tight with no edge in the floor.

Which materials can actually carry through every room?

Which materials suit all rooms

Not every covering works equally well everywhere. Living spaces tolerate almost anything; kitchen and bathroom ask more in terms of moisture and cleaning.

The table is a guide, not a verdict. A dense natural stone behaves quite differently in the kitchen from a soft limestone, and a well-kept oak parquet will last many years in a family kitchen. A detailed comparison is in our article on flooring: parquet, natural stone, ceramic and terrazzo.

Parquet as a continuous floor

In the Viennese Altbau, parquet is the classic floor, ideal for living spaces, bedrooms and hallways. In the kitchen an oiled or lacquered parquet works well as long as spilt water is wiped up promptly. In the bathroom parquet is possible, but only with suitable woods, good ventilation and outside the directly wet areas. It is a deliberate choice for a living surface that is allowed to show its history. How woods change over time is described in our article on real wood in interior fit-out.

Ceramic and terrazzo as a continuous floor

Large-format ceramic and terrazzo come into their own where the floor is meant to be identical everywhere, from the hallway into the shower. Large formats with few, narrow joints look almost jointless. More in our article on large-format ceramic. In Vienna, terrazzo is an old friend from stairwells and coffee houses and is enjoying a comeback, as our article on terrazzo for floors and vanity tops shows.

Which leaves the question most people ask first: what about the bathroom?

Must the bathroom have the same floor?

The honest answer: not necessarily. Continuous flooring does its best work in the rooms you experience together: hallway, living space, kitchen, corridor. The bathroom is a room of its own behind a door. It may take a different material, provided the transition is carefully designed.

We usually distinguish two strategies:

1. One floor for everything. Ceramic, terrazzo or natural stone runs through the whole apartment, bathroom included. This gives the greatest calm, especially in small apartments.
2. One floor for the living spaces, a second for wet rooms. Parquet in living, sleeping and kitchen; stone or ceramic in the bathroom. The change lies exactly beneath the closed door leaf, with no difference in height.

Our couple choose the second strategy. The old herringbone parquet in the living room is sanded, patched where needed and continued in the same pattern through the other living spaces. In the bathroom goes a floor of large-format, warm grey ceramic, running flush into the shower. Imagine stepping out of that shower on a winter morning onto a floor that is warm underfoot, and walking on into the bedroom without a single edge to notice. How the bathroom is planned as a whole is shown on the bathroom renovation page.

All that calm on the surface has to be earned underneath.

The technology beneath the floor

A continuous floor without thresholds looks simple. Beneath it lies a good deal of planning, especially in an Altbau.

Matching build-up heights

Different coverings have different thicknesses. A glued parquet is often thinner or thicker than a tile with its adhesive bed. If two materials are to meet without a threshold, the substrate has to compensate. In the Viennese Altbau kitchens and small side rooms often sit at a different level from the main rooms, because other floors were once laid. The levelling is usually done with a new screed or a levelling layer.

Joints and movement

Wood moves with humidity, screed and ceramic with temperature. For floating parquet many manufacturers require movement joints at doorways or beyond certain room lengths. Fully bonded parquet usually allows larger continuous areas. The exact limits depend on product and substrate and are fixed with the floor layer, in line with the manufacturer's instructions.

Underfloor heating

A continuous floor and underfloor heating go well together, because the whole surface warms evenly. Ceramic and stone conduct heat very well, wood a little less. Covering and heating must be matched to each other. How surface heating and cooling work in a renovation is explained in our article on heating and cooling through surfaces.

Impact sound

In apartment buildings the neighbours below can hear you. In a renovation with a new floor, impact-sound insulation should therefore be planned in. Some property managers (Hausverwaltungen) set minimum requirements. We clarify this before choosing the material.

Once the technology is settled, the look is decided by a few quiet choices.

Laying direction, format and rhythm

Even with a single material, many decisions change the effect.

• Laying direction. Boards laid along the main sightline or the incoming light lengthen the room. Laid crosswise they look wider but shorter.
• Pattern. Herringbone and parquet panels are directionally neutral and work well in apartments with many rooms and changes of direction.
• Board width. Wide boards look calm and generous, narrow ones livelier. In an Altbau both work, depending on the proportions of the room.
• Tile format. With ceramic, the larger the format, the fewer the joints and the calmer the floor. A large format, however, needs a very level substrate.

These decisions belong to the whole apartment, not to one room at a time. Only then does a rhythm arise that runs through every room. At Richard Atelier we ask first, "How do you want to live?", and let the answer set the rhythm; the logic is part of a larger material concept that thinks floor, built-ins and walls together.

A continuous floor is not a detail chosen at the end. It is one of the first decisions on which everything else builds.

Which raises the matter of order. What comes first?

Step by step to a continuous floor

This is how we go about the planning:

1. Survey what exists. Which floors lie where, at what level, on what substrate? What can be kept?
2. Clarify use. Where is cooking done, where bathing, where do children or pets run about? Is there underfloor heating?
3. Choose a strategy. One floor for everything, or two floors matched to each other.
4. Fix material and format. With large samples on site, in the real light.
5. Plan the build-up. Heights, screed, insulation, joints, transitions to doors and bathroom.
6. Set the sequence of trades. The floor comes after the wet work but before the built-ins, so wardrobes and kitchen stand on the finished floor.

The last point matters more than it sounds. If the floor runs beneath the kitchen, the kitchen can later be rebuilt without floor repairs. If it stops at the plinth, the kitchen stays where it is for ever. Our own joinery, Tischlerkultur, a Viennese carpentry tradition since 1935, builds the fitted pieces to the finished floor, with one contact for you from planning to handover. Anyone who also wants to open a wall will find the questions to clear up beforehand in our article on the open-plan kitchen and living space.