Choosing the flooring materials for your house will depend on your interior design style, your budget and your lifestyle, for example whether or not you have pets, kids or a hobby that could damage your floors. Here are some great examples of the 5 most popular flooring materials in Singapore.

1. Marvellous Marble

Marble floors are not the cheapest option, but they are certainly the most elegant and definitely add a feeling of luxury and opulence to a room. Marble is available in slabs - usually used in kitchens and bathrooms, or as large format tiles, which is most commonly used for floors. This 1 Newton apartment looks to have been done with either very large marble tiles, or even slabs of marble.

Designer: Dyel Design 

In this modern Poiz Residences home, large marble tiles have been used to create a seamless flow throughout the living, dining, kitchen and entry spaces. Pale marble like this is also a great way to create more light in a space as it is slightly reflective.

Designer: The Interior Lab 

Choosing a marble with a subtle colour, like the one in this Eco Sanctuary apartment, can also tie together your interior design scheme by matching it to timber details. Marble needs to be sealed to be used on floors, and isn’t very child or pet friendly thanks to its very slippery surface.

Designer: Forefront Interior 

2. Wonderful Wood

Since timber flooring can be more expensive, it is often used as a feature to highlight different uses in an open-plan living space like in this Pasir Ris apartment.

Designer: Liid Studio 

Although we usually see timber flooring in the plank version, traditional techniques like the parquetry featured in this Kim Keat bedroom add a layer of texture and colour to a room, and is a growing trend in more and more homes.

Designer: Rezt & Relax Interior Design 

The engineered timber flooring in this Bedok North Apartment creates a clever Scandinavian feel, matching the wooden furniture and the feature wall too.

Designer: Dreamcatcher Interior Design 

Although this stunning statement floor looks like it is made of random pieces of recycled wooden boards, it’s actually a clever decorative tile. Despite this, the warm and rustic feel of wood stands out.

Designer: Starry Homestead 

Timber and tile? Or two types of tile? This very clever mix of materials shows that you can use a well done decorative tile that looks like timber, mix it with tiles, and get a really serviceable floor. All the benefits of tile - cheaper, hardwearing - with the warm feel of timber.

Designer: KDOT Associates

3. Pretty Patterns

Floors don’t have to be plain in colour. One of the hottest new interior design trends is the use of patterned tiles to add life, texture and colour to our floors. The printed concrete tiles in this Veerasamy Road kitchen are a great way to add more interest to what could have been a very basic tiled floor.

Designer: Dots 'N' Tots Interior Group 

Another way to add pattern to your floor space is to create a feature using a mix of materials like the timber, stone and tiles on this Bishan Street balcony.

Designer: Starry Homestead 

Tiles and patterns don’t have to be simple; you can go crazy on the floor with decorative tiles like the ones in this Clementi Casadia kitchen, and then mix them with simple white and blue accents above. 

Designer: Dots 'N' Tots Interior Group 

You can also use patterns to create a separation of spaces like the use of printed tiles in the living space of this Bishan Street 23 apartment. The tiles add a retro, Peranakan, feel to the interior design by adding texture and colour.

The tiling from the living space travel around the main room to create a border for the dining area in the same apartment, cleverly separating the two spaces. 

Designer: Fuse Concept 

The same idea has been used in this elegant apartment in The Grand Duchess, using matching patterned tiles in the kitchen and dining spaces to tie them together. 

Designer: Fuse Concept 

Concrete floors are a cool, unfussy, long-lasting type of flooring that looks fantastic in Industrial Style interiors. Usually the decorative concrete is added as a thin screed with a self-leveler added, over existing concrete floors, and is sometimes patterned with additional colours to create a marbled effect like the floors above.

Designer: Fuse Concept 

Usually found in shades of grey, like the apartment above, concrete can also be coloured with pigment powders and have glass or stone chips added to it to create patterns. Concrete floors can also be ‘burnished’ ie. smoothed and rubbed to get a low-sheen look; or ‘polished’ which is actually created by using a vinyl top coat that creates the super shiny surface.

Designer: Fifth Avenue Interior 

You can also look for concrete tiles to use, particularly if you want to add other materials to your floor like the mix in the Yishun apartment above.

Designer: Dots 'N' Tots Interior Group

5. Vital Vinyl

Gone are the days when vinyl was only used in government buildings, hospitals and schools. Vinyl flooring is now available in a huge range of attractive patterns and decorative looks like the pale timber flooring in this apartment in the Loft Seletar.

Designer: MMJ Design Loft 

Vinyl flooring is affordable and very hard-wearing, it is great for homes that have kids and pets as it is softer underfoot and less hard if you are worried about your children falling over and hurting themselves. 

Designer: Elpis Interior Design 

If you really want to have a hardwood timber floor but either can’t afford it or you are worried about the upkeep of it, you can choose a vinyl floor, like this one, that looks almost exactly the same.

Designer: Fifth Avenue Interior