Does changing the floor change the furniture too?

No. This is a focused mode. The floor changes and the walls, furniture, and lighting stay as photographed.

What flooring materials can I try?

Engineered and solid wood in any species and format, herringbone and chevron, tile of any size and finish, polished concrete, vinyl, and carpet. Anything that is a floor covering rather than a structural change.

How should I photograph the room?

From a corner, with a clear run of floor towards the far wall. The shallow receding angle is what makes plank width and grain readable, and it is the whole reason this beats a sample.

My room is full of furniture. Will it still work?

Less well, because the model can only render the floor it can see. Run a Declutter pass first and change the flooring on the cleared version.

Can I specify the direction the boards run?

You can ask, but it is among the least reliably honoured instructions. Board direction follows the room geometry and camera angle. If it matters to your decision, it is a question for the fitter.

Why does the floor look different from the sample I ordered?

Because a sample is viewed from above at hand size and a floor is viewed at a shallow angle across a whole room. Plank width, grain at distance, and sheen all read completely differently at real scale.

Can I try it before paying?

Yes. Sign in with Google to get three free generations, no credit card required. After that, credits come in one-time packs starting at $9 for 20 designs, and they never expire.

Can I change the floor and the walls in one pass?

Better to do them separately. Two focused passes let you judge each surface on its own; one combined instruction gives you two variables moving at once.

There is a rug in my photo. Should I remove it?

Yes, physically or with a Declutter pass. A rug covers the part of the floor you most want to judge, so a floor change under one tells you very little.

Will it get the plank width right if I specify it?

Wide-plank and narrow-board are both understood and are worth stating, since width is the property that most changes how a floor reads. Exact millimetre dimensions are not.

Does it work on stairs and hallways?

Hallways work well and are a good use, since they are usually the least furnished floor in the house. Stairs are harder because the geometry is more complex and less of each tread is visible.

Can I use the result to get a quote?

It is a good way to communicate what you want to a supplier or fitter. It is not a measurement: use the room's real dimensions for quantities, not the image.

Feature

Last updated August 30, 2026

See the floor before you order it

Flooring is the most expensive surface in most rooms and the hardest to picture from a sample. Put it down in the actual room first.

Change the flooring

One surface

the floor changes, the room does not

Real perspective

seen at the angle you actually stand at

30 seconds

per material, so compare several

A flooring sample is a hand-sized board seen from above, under shop lights. The floor you are buying is forty square metres seen at a shallow angle, running away from you towards a window, with the grain direction and the plank width doing most of the visual work. Those are exactly the properties a sample cannot show you, which is why floors so often surprise people once laid. Changing the flooring in a photo shows the material across the visible room and from the photographed angle, but it does not provide measured scale.

What this mode does

Input: A room photo with a clear visible run of floor.
What changes: The visible flooring material, pattern, tone, and finish.
What stays: Walls, furniture, lighting, architecture, and camera position.
Use another mode when: Use real measurements, samples, and a fitter for quantity, suitability, feel, and installation.

Why flooring samples mislead

The mismatch is one of scale and angle. A sample is held at arm's length, viewed from directly above, lit from in front. A floor is seen from standing height at a shallow angle, receding towards a light source, covering the largest continuous surface in the room. Under those conditions the properties that dominate are ones the sample barely hints at: how the grain reads at distance, how wide the planks look relative to the room, how much the finish catches the light coming in from a window.

Plank width is the clearest example. Wide boards make a room read calmer and larger because there are fewer joint lines; narrow boards read busier and more traditional. On a sample the difference is a detail. Across a whole floor it is the single most noticeable property of the material, and people regularly order a floor whose width they never consciously considered.

Sheen behaves similarly. A matte and a satin finish look nearly identical on a sample board. Laid across a room with a window at one end, the satin picks up a long reflective sweep that changes throughout the day, and the matte does not. Neither is better, but they produce quite different rooms, and the sample gives you no way to anticipate which you would prefer.

What to describe, and what to leave alone

Describe the material in physical terms. Wide-plank light oak with a matte finish gives the model four useful properties. Nice wooden floor gives it none. Naming the format matters as much as naming the material: herringbone, chevron, plank, and parquet in the same oak produce very different rooms, and the pattern is often the thing someone actually has an opinion about without having a word for it.

Colour and tone are worth being specific about, because wood species names carry a lot of ambiguity. Oak spans almost white to mid-brown depending on finish, so pale, warm, or smoked in front of it does real work. For tile, format and finish matter most: large-format matte porcelain and small glossy square tile are barely the same product.

What is not worth specifying is the direction the boards run. It follows the room's geometry and the camera angle, and instructions about layout direction are among the least reliably honoured of any request. If board direction genuinely matters to your decision, it is a question for the fitter rather than the render.

Where it gets harder

The mode needs to see floor. A room photographed so that the furniture covers nearly all of it leaves the model rendering the visible slivers and inferring the rest, and inference is where inconsistency creeps in. Shoot from a corner with a clear run of floor towards the far wall and the results improve markedly. If the room is heavily furnished, running a Declutter pass first and changing the floor on the cleared version is a reliable trick.

Rugs are the other common complication. A large rug covering the centre of the room hides the area the eye most wants to judge, and asking for a floor change while a rug sits on it produces exactly what you asked for: a new floor, still mostly hidden. Remove the rug before you photograph, or clear it first.

Reflective floors deserve a check before you commit. Polished concrete and high-gloss tile reflect the room, and reflections are inferred rather than observed, so a gloss floor may reflect something slightly different from what is actually above it. It rarely matters for a decision about the material, but it is worth knowing before you use the image for anything other than choosing.

What a render cannot tell you about a floor

The render answers one question and answers it better than anything else available: what this material looks like across your room, at your angle, in your light. That is precisely the question a sample answers worst, which is why the mode is worth using. It is not the only question a floor has to answer, though, and a good-looking image is not a decision. The properties that decide whether you regret a floor in two years are mostly invisible in a picture.

Suitability is the first of them. Solid wood behaves differently over underfloor heating than engineered board. Some woods and laminates are a poor idea in a bathroom or a utility room whatever they look like. Dogs, wheeled chairs, and a front door opening straight onto the floor all argue for a harder wearing surface than the one that photographs best. Flats often carry lease conditions about acoustic underlay, which is a paperwork question rather than a design one, and it still decides the floor.

Cost and feel are the others. The price of a floor is the material plus fitting plus underlay plus whatever the subfloor needs doing to it, and the ranking by total cost is frequently not the ranking by sample price. Tile is cold and hard underfoot, wood is warmer and carries sound, carpet absorbs it. Use the render to get from a dozen candidates down to two or three, then order samples of those and settle the practical questions with a fitter.

Why change flooring works

Judge it at the right scale

Plank width, grain direction, and tile size only read correctly across a whole floor. A sample board shows none of it.

The rest of the room stays put

A focused mode changes the floor and leaves the walls, furniture, and lighting alone, so you are comparing floors rather than schemes.

Expensive to get wrong

Flooring is usually the largest single material cost in a room and the most disruptive to replace. It is worth ten minutes of looking first.

See it against what you own

A floor has to work with your existing furniture and wall colour. That relationship is the whole question, and a sample cannot show it.

Hard flooring or soft

Engineered oak, herringbone, large-format tile, polished concrete, vinyl, or wall-to-wall carpet are all floor finishes.

Pairs with the wall mode

Floor and wall are the two surfaces that set a room's character. Change one, look, then change the other.

How it works

1
Photograph the room
From a corner, so a good stretch of floor runs away from the camera. That perspective is what makes the result readable.
2
Describe the flooring
Name the material and its character: wide-plank light oak, herringbone walnut, large-format matte grey porcelain.
3
Compare and decide
Run two or three materials and view them side by side before you order anything.

Go deeper

What changes and what stays How to photograph a room Room design ideas For homeowners Interior design glossary All design modes