What is the best material for flooring?
What do you recommend to use for flooring? Real wood, engineered wood, any particular brand? Also for kitchen and bathroom floor, what do you recommend to use tile, travertine, marble?
There are a few things to consider when choosing flooring for a home, and as you mention, we have often chosen different materials for bathrooms or kitchens to improve durability since both those areas are more prone to having standing water than in living areas. Here is our page about choosing flooring to see the options-
How to choose eco-friendly, healthy, durable and beautiful floors
Some of the things you want to consider of course start with aesthetics so that you will actually like your floor, other considerations are choosing sustainable materials that are durable and that don’t degrade the interior air quality of your home with any toxic materials that will off-gas. We have built a couple of demonstration homes in recent years and in one we used cork flooring (see our DIY cork flooring installation video here), and the other we did polished concrete slab on grade with Marmoleum flooring upstairs.
Some people find concrete floors to hard for standing comfortably, in which case you can cover them as long as you choose a material that isn’t impacted by radiant floors if you have them. If you choose wood flooring, we recommend using a natural non-toxic wood finishing oil instead of varnish for reasons of air quality and durability.