Checkered floors: Just a Trend or a Timeless Classic?

Harlequin, check, checkerboard, whatever you choose to call it… We can all agree that checkered floors have been everywhere lately. Whether it’s beautiful marble tile laid in the perfect harlequin pattern, a checkerboard handmade rug to spruce up a room in no time, peel and stick tiles to cover that drab old tile in your kitchen, or in my case, peel and stick carpet squares from Home Depot to add some interest to our sunroom on a very tiny budget.

With seeing a certain design element all over the internet and seeming to gain more traction from one week to the next, it leads me to the question: is this just another trend that people will be leaving behind within the next year or is it the resurgence of a timeless design element that has been around for ages?

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To me, it is a little bit of both timeless and trendy with designers dancing between the two. It all comes down to how it is executed within each space and home. A timeless design element is typically put in place because it is expected to be within that space for years, even decades, to come which typically equates to a larger investment as true quality and craftsmanship go hand-in-hand with classic, and mostly grandeur, design features.

Laying large-scale marble tiles with other large features sprinkled throughout a space, such as the floors, high ceilings, grand doors and windows in Chris Loves Julia‘s dining room above, ties in the pattern as a current trend while also achieving the timeless and classic element you would find in a stately home that is decades old.

On the contrary to the much more permanent, and what I would classify as the more timeless checkered floor install route, there are a number of other ways to incorporate that dreamy look into your home. This is where pulling my opinion more towards “just a trend” comes into play for me, although not any lesser than the more timeless approach to tiling your space, pulling in a checkered rug or using peel and stick tiles grants you the same look for much less of an investment (both time and money).

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A trend is something that can be more readily swapped out, if wanted, as we move away from one trend onto another, which is exactly what you get with these essentially less “timeless” options. Trendy or not, timeless or not, checkered floors are a tried and true design staple and I love seeing them within different homes as I scroll my feed… to me they are something that can never be wrong and they always look right.

Of course checkered floors are without a doubt one of the “it” trends circulating right now, yet that doesn’t mean it can’t also remain the timeless design element that it has always been, past and present. At times it is easy to write-off any design element that is being seen over and over again, even though in different styles and spaces, on your home decor-centric Instagram feed as “just another trend” but when it comes to checkered floors… they’re not going anywhere because to some degree they never even left.