Concrete floors: A canvas at your feet

TACOMA, Wash. — The visual warmth of a spectacular sunburst and slender crescent moon emanates from the entryway floor in Bonnie Wyatt's home in Seattle.

The design is carved into a rock-hard canvas awash in golden browns and amber hues. Yet the material of the flooring is as much a stunner as the design.

"People who come to the door go, 'Oh, I love that,'" Wyatt said of the design work by concrete artisan Douglas Palmer of Fox Island, Wash. "They're surprised it's concrete."

Concrete is becoming far more than the stuff of building foundations and driveways these days.

The battleship-gray surface can be ground down, shined and stained to achieve a lustrous finish akin to polished stone.

For years, it's appeared in swanky Las Vegas casinos, restaurants, auto showrooms and other commercial venues.

Now homeowners are ripping up carpet to have the concrete slab hiding below polished or stained. Some are building houses from the get-go with polished concrete embedded with radiant heating systems that warm the toesies.

"Concrete polishing is an ever expanding part of our business," said Dale Hoyt, whose floor installation and maintenance company in Puyallup, Wash., added concrete polishing to its services two years ago. Though the bulk of the decorative concrete work is commercial, residential jobs are growing for the Diamond Polishing Systems division.

People are discovering, he said, "it's a very green floor, a very natural and pretty floor."

Douglas Palmer's ConcreteScape on Fox Island has specialized for more than seven years in decorative concrete for residences. Besides staining and polishing, Palmer stamps textures in freshly poured concrete, and, in cured concrete, can score designs or etch lines and fill them with grout for a tile-like look.

"We do acid stains to bring character to the floor. You can 'marble-ize' it. You can do checker patterns, with some sections that are lighter or darker. You can do mosaics," Palmer said. "We feel like it's a piece of artwork."

Beyond aesthetic preferences, decorative concrete offers practical advantages over other types of flooring, owners and contractors say:

— It's more durable than hardwood, vinyl or carpet, especially for leaky basements in the rain-soaked Northwest. If properly installed and finished, concrete never needs to be replaced.