Concrete floors have a restless quality to them. An empty room with a bare floor can feel huge and unforgiving, the sound bouncing off the walls with a harshness that echoes through the space. And the cold! The floor is a cold surface against which your feet are in close contact. But to lay a carpet on a cold concrete floor is to change everything. The room has a new feel, it has settled down in some way and is holding still.
The physics of how a room functions can be explained in some detail. In a room with a hard floor surface the hard floor acts as a number of hard surfaces and as such most of the sound energy that hits the floor is reflected. The sound bounces off from the hard surfaces of the room and this is why areas such as hospital corridors and empty halls tend to have very echoey qualities. In contrast a room with a soft floor surface such as carpet has a number of soft surfaces and as such a large proportion of the sound energy that hits the floor is absorbed. A typical carpet for example can absorb six to seven times as much sound as a bare concrete floor. This is why a room with carpet tends to have a much more subdued sound than a room with a hard floor surface. Acousticians measure how much a surface absorbs sound using something called an absorption coefficient, which is a figure between 0 and 1. Hard surfaces have low absorption coefficients and so most of the sound that hits them is reflected. Soft surfaces have high absorption coefficients and so most of the sound that hits them is absorbed. Carpet typically has an absorption coefficient of around 0.35 to 0.55 at mid frequencies. Bare concrete on the other hand has an absorption coefficient of around 0.02 at mid frequencies, making it one of the worst surfaces for sound absorption.
But there is another reason too for the difference in perceived temperature between a stone floor and a timber or carpeted floor. The thermal gap between air and floor, and the way that this is perceived by our feet, is far greater on a cold stone floor than on a warm timber or carpeted floor. So even when the air temperature is the same, a stone floor will feel cold, while a timber or carpeted floor will feel warm.
But, for a specific and unique set of requirements, the flooring in Edinburgh’s stone tenements can create some of the greatest contrast of all before and after shots. The closes, the stone staircases and draughty landings of the old building provide a backdrop that brings out the acoustic qualities of the floor more than almost anywhere.
To consider all your options, there is more to Flooring Edinburgh at kristoffersencarpets.com.
And then there is the curious piece of research from the field of psychoacoustics. In studies where participants are asked to estimate the size of a room, they have been found to be consistently larger when the floor is hard and reflective. A softer floor will result in a perceived ‘shrinking’ of the space but, and this is an important but, it is a smaller space – in the sense that it feels warmer, more contained and less anxious. The room no longer echoes its emptiness back at you.
And this is what ‘holding still’ of a room means. Not adding decorations to a room to make it feel more complete. Not making a room feel more comfortable in a vague sort of way. The floor is the surface in a room which is doing the most acoustic and thermal work. When it is right for you then the space will simply stop feeling unfinished.
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