Natural Cork Flooring In Your Kitchen

Using natural cork flooring in your kitchen is an interesting choice if you want to go with a sustainable flooring material.  Cork floor tiles are very interesting and have an elegant look much different from other types of wood flooring because they have a burled appearance.  This can give your kitchen a unique look that you just don’t find in every home!

While you may not have heard too much about cork flooring it’s actually not that new.  In fact there are buildings right here in the US which are over a hundred years old and still have the original cork floor’s.  So, you can see, cork will hold up pretty good in your kitchen is a flooring material.

One great thing about natural cork flooring is that not only is it durable it’s also a bit cushiony.  When compared to traditional hardwood floors or sustainable bamboo flooring, cork will be a little bit easier on the feet because of its resilient nature.

Cork floor tiles typically come in 12 x 12 or 12 x 24 inch sizes.  You can actually get planks that are  1′ x 3′  if you want to have a floating cork floor.  The planks float on your subfloor and give it more of a hardwood floor appearance where as the tiles will give it more of a parquet flooring appear.

Now, when it comes to flooring for your kitchen, cork is probably one of the better choices because the kitchen is a very busy room.  Therefore, there’s a lot of traffic and a lot of noise.  As mentioned before, cork flooring will provide a bit of a cushion for your feet, it also will absorb the noise better and have less of that “echo” sound that bamboo or hardwood would have.

Natural cork flooring is also an interesting choice because of the way it is made.  Sustainable cork is grown in forests which use sustainable methods.  The cork is actually bark that is harvested from mature trees.  Once the bark is removed, more bark actually grows back!  So whether you choose a floating cork floor or cork floor tiles, you can rest assured that no trees were harmed during the manufacture of your kitchen floor!