All hail the carpet! After years of stripping underlay and getting the sander out to buff those wooden board into shape its safe to say the carpet is back in fashion! In our previous home we did the whole splinter and stain thing, but we always felt that the house was missing a couple of things; first off, peace and quiet, wooden floors are so loud, secondly comfort! There wasn’t much worse that in the depths of a British winter feeling the icy touch of hard floors. As we embarked on our cinema room fantasy we began to research carpet options for a cosier, snugglier finish, and hears what we learned along the way!
1. The options out there are wild!
It’s not secret that we like to go BOLD! So we began researching big bold patterned carpets, there’s loads to choose from and google will help you find all manner of weird and wonderful. A word of advice, be sure that you check where your supplier is getting the carpet from? Is it direct or is it being shipped from another country? We wanted to go for something made here in the UK, mainly for quality reasons. The other reason is lead times. We were working to a deadline and needed this bold beauty quick time. Luckily Alternative Flooring tick both these boxes and had several patterns that were piquing our interest.
Cinema Room: the Before, courtesy of the previous owners
2. Seeing is believing
One of those patterns happened to be Zebra print in Alternative Floorings ‘Quirky B’ range. We had been sharing day dreams of letting loose with the carpet, this is our forever home, and releasing ourselves from the fear or ‘resale’ has really encouraged us to design in a way that pleases us. We were also exploring Alternative Flooring's black and white ‘Honeycomb’ print along with the incredibly divine ‘Fibonacci’ pattern – it’s truly wondrous! Luckily for us we discovered if you visit the mobile website you can actually test the carpets on you very own room, using their Show Me My Room app! Clever tech maps out your floor and even dodges your furniture to show you the carpet design your very own home.
Thanks to that handy tool we saw a miracle unfold before our eyes. The ‘Zebo Black’ zebra print carpet came together with our Electric Lagoon wallpaper to create a stunning vision of beauty. Chris and I were officially obsessed! But we discovered a slight problem- the Zebo came max width 3.66m and our room was 4m wide… drama!
Show Me My Room: Alternative Flooring app
3. Fit for Failure
Drama over… what we quickly discovered is that this is actually quite normal. A good carpet fitter can stitch the repeat together seamlessly to extend your carpet’s width. It’s worth finding a good fitter, a good carpet supplier will have recommended suppliers in your area. We were connected with a lovely man named Stuart from Hertford Flooring, who had lots of experience fitting high end hotels, so we knew we were in safe hands.
Offering floor plans (even if they are rough) is advisable as it will help your fitter know any complications ahead of their arrival and give you a much better estimate for the amount of carpet you will need.. We have an inbuilt step into the room along with a tricky shape where a fireplace once existed.
Cinema Room: original concrete floor
4. It’s what’s underneath that counts
Yes, underlay, it is important and will change the ‘buoyancy’ of your carpet. Personally, we like it squishy and soft. Our previous carpet was none of these things, just a sad thin flaccid layer of wool on concrete, this didn’t fit our fantasy for a luxury cinema room. Our fitter recommended using a special underlay made from recycled plastic bottles, it happened to be super squishy too, so win win!
Cinema Room: Carpet laid by the experts at Hertford Flooring
5. An eye for detail!
It sounds silly but really try and get into the detail before your fitter arrived. We didn’t but thankfully Stuart guided us through the process. There are details that are easily overlooked. If you have a repeat or a striped carpet, think about it’s orientation. We wanted our zebra striped to run toward the TV, almost like they are leading your eye to it. We also needed to negotiated a sofa that would be covering over a third of the room, so planning how the stripes interacted with that was important too.
Cinema Room: carpet fully installed!
So that’s everything you need to know about our Quirky B Zebo carpet adventure. It’s been a wild ride transforming this room from magnolia misery to bold maximalist jungle. Hopefully this is useful for you if you are considering a new plush carpet to create a cosy sanctuary!
