Here's the problem with choosing a floor colour: you can't try it on. A kitchen you can repaint next weekend if you hate it. A floor is sanded once, stained once, and then you live with it. So the decision carries weight, and most people make it from a tiny swatch and a hopeful squint.
We've just launched something that fixes that, and as far as we know, nobody else around here has it.
Every Floor Visualiser Shows You New Floors. Ours Shows You YOURS.
You've probably seen visualisers on the big flooring websites: upload a photo, and they paste a brand-new floor into your room. Fine, if you're buying a new floor. Useless if what you actually want is your existing floorboards sanded back and refinished in a new colour, which is most of the work we do.
The Howard Naish visualiser does both, and it's the sanding side that makes it special. Upload one photo of your room, pick from our twelve LOBA stain colours, and it shows you your own floor, same boards, same pattern, same herringbone or plank direction, in the new colour. Not a stock photo. Not somebody else's lounge. Yours.
How It Works
- Take one photo of your room. Phone is fine. Best results come from a shot where the floor is the star and people are out of frame.
- Pick your colour. Sanding and refinishing in any of our twelve stains from bleached white to near-black, or a brand-new floor from the Staki range if that's the direction you're leaning.
- Choose the details. New floors can be tried as wide planks or herringbone, pointing whichever way suits your room.
- Twenty-odd seconds later, there's your room. Before and after, side by side.
How It Actually Gets Used On Real Jobs
Clients meet the visualiser two ways. Some find it themselves before they ever ring us, and arrive at the site visit already knowing they're a dark-floor household. Others hear about it from us when we send the quote, and have a play that evening. Both work.
Where it really earns its keep is the decisions people find hardest. On a fitting job, the biggest one after the board itself is direction: planks running down the room or across it, herringbone pointing at the window or the door. It genuinely changes how a room feels, and it's hard to imagine from a brochure. The visualiser lets you flip between directions on a photo of your actual room in seconds. We still prove it in real life before a single board is fixed: on the day, we lay loose planks out in both directions on your floor and let you stand there and look. But arriving at that moment already knowing what you expect to prefer makes it a confirmation, not a coin-toss.
Colours work the same way. Twelve stains is a lovely range and an overwhelming shortlist. Most clients use the visualiser to get themselves from twelve down to two or three, and that's exactly what we want: it means the samples we send and the free patch test on your boards are comparing genuine contenders rather than working through the whole deck. The decision gets better AND faster.
Your First One Is Free
Enter your email on the visualiser page and your first visualisation is on us. When we come out for your free site visit, you'll get a personal access code that unlocks ten more, so you can try every room in every colour before a single board is touched.
One honest caveat, the same one we give in person: the visualiser is a brilliant guide to direction, but screens aren't floors. The final colour decision always happens on your actual boards, with our free on-site patch test, before any finish is committed. The visualiser tells you whether you're a "dark and dramatic" household or a "pale and Scandinavian" one. The patch test picks the exact shade.
Wondering what your floor could be? Find out in under a minute, without moving a stick of furniture.
Try it: howardnaish.co.uk/visualiser
Call us: 020 3131 0122
Or book a free site visit and get your full access code.