A medium-dark brown is rarely a mis-step.

Medium stain, like @palimpsest said.

Works with white cabinets, too.

Pale European Oak flat cut. 7-9"+ width. Not yellow. Better than White Oak because it has a tighter grain that isn't open. A different species altogether.

New World Oak | CALI (calibamboo.com)

Also with a SPC waterproof core. Pacific Oak | CALI (calibamboo.com) This is constructed like LVP with a real wood veneer top layer under the same aluminum oxide finish. Good for kitchens

If you search European or French Oak flooring, you'll see many examples in different tones.

Wide-plank engineered Hardwood flooring with Bona® UV Urethane finish - monarchplank

Collections - Silvan Hardwood - Flooret

Poly, just poly.

With flooring I would choose the most timeless floor, not the latest trend. It’s too expensive to replace. Medium tone hardwood is probably the most timeless. A white oak with no stain and a water based poly is also pretty. Red oak needs stain IMO to help neutralize the orange.

Susie - any inspirational picture you can share? Appreciate it

Darbuka showed you timeless.

According to Maria Killiam, the designer. Medium brown to light floors. No grey or dark. What’s really popular is light/medium white oak floors. It’s all over Instagram!! Haha

Here is the predicted wood shade of the year 2023,

We start slowly gearing our stocked floors towards the shade, medium brown.

Even though medium brown floor has been talked about for a while in flooring business, we haven't seen many good selling products available yet. Customers are still attracted to White Oak floors with Scandinavian whitewash, slightly warm-toned and just natural. Here are a few inspirational pics:

Cicerone White Ale · More Info

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Medium brown engineered wood floors. Wire brush texture and hard wax oil finish. I have 3 dogs and the floors are performing really well, no scratches and no stains from spills or drool.

You can search photos on Houzz. Filter floor color by medium hardwood. Below are two I would call medium. We have very dark stained white oak in our house, which I love but they are not for everyone. They have lightened over the years where the room gets more sun. They do show more dust than my previous medium toned floor.

Request for medium/dark stain and light colored floors are still pretty equal this year. Scale isn't tipping to one side. More and more request for low to zero VOC finishes.

@ Susie

I love those brown oak floors. Thanks for sharing.

@ G & S Floor Service

You must be mainly in wood floor sanding and finishing business. In Minnesota we are still dominantly light-colored floors for prefinished market.

@Unique Wood Floors

Yes, 99% of my projects are site-finished floors. Perfecting the art of sanding and finishing is very important for me. What you sell in the prefinished market, I need to replicate on-site.

I just did my kitchen - same Miraggio gray countertops. White cabinets and island. We refinished the floor with provincial stain - timeless. I had it before. Looks great.

@uniquewoodfloors are they yours? They are the perfect stain color IMO.

@ G & S Floor Service

That's so amazing! Site-finishing is a combination of science and art. I can't imagine how you do it. Often time, prefinished factories can have hard time to duplicate the exact look and feel on white oak floors.

My floors, shown above at the top of this thread, are site installed/finished white oak. The stain is a combination of Natural and Early American.

That’s something to keep in mind…stains can be modified by combining two or more colors…until you reach the tone that most appeals.

@ Susie

They are our stocked floors and mostly our own installation! Thanks for your kind words!

Thanks everyone for the feedback. We are leaning towards medium brown stain. We have red oak wood.

Any recommendations for the stain brand and polyurethane? My contractor is suggesting 1 coat of Duraseal stain followed by 3 coats of Bona water based polyurethane.

I wonder if certain looks are location-specific. Around here, don't see much of the very light floor ("Scandinavian" style - similar to dan1888's first pic). You can't go wrong with a mid-tone brown, it never was in style so it can't go out of style -- never was trendy, always was and will be fail-safe.

@g & s floor service - appreciate your guidance

The house I grew up in had oak hardwood throughout and I remember being so embarrassed by my mom's oriental area rugs and our floors. All my friends had wall to wall carpet in their homes and I thought our house was old fashioned and ugly.

Then I lived in a dorm with cement floors, tiny NYC apartments with parquet floors, and finally, in my 40's, I had a place with wall to wall carpet. They looked crummy and you couldn't change them. UGH lesson learned. So I bought a 100 year old house with original old growth hardwood and I haven't looked back.

Today I think non-trendy, classic, hardwood floors are the most lovely thing in the world. I love the grain in the wood, the warmth they give a room, and I have come full circle on the oil finish.

I don't like grey toned floors, or dark stained floors, clearcoat light floors can have a weird pinky hue sometimes. Nothing beats a natural wood grained floor, unstained, and three coats of satin oil finish. Oak, cherry, walnut, douglas fir, red birch, and the exotic woods look best just left alone and unstained.

@Sherry Brighton

Great wood story of yours! Unstained natural wood floor is the most timeless.

I heard in Europe 50% of the wood floors are in natural finish. When you ask a wood floor finishing professional what he thinks the best-looking wood floor. 8 of 10 tell you white oak natural.

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In the old days of oil-based finishes wood 'yellowed' because of the finish. Today, water-based finishes have allowed for tones that are brown without the yellow. More actual wood tones. No grey. Wide plank engineered hardwood flooring in European Oak and Walnut (monarchplank.com)

Unfinished prime French Oak.

Unfinished rustic-

Unfinished fumed

No yellow or gray. Not really 'trendy'. These options use the progress in modern finishes. The yellow is dated not timeless.

I love unfinished fumed color. It is such a pleasant-looking brown. Thanks for sharing!

Light raw wood look is still very in style right now and probably will stay that way. Darker walnut tones have become to come back since 2022 but for open concept I recommend the lighter tones to make the space feel brighter and airy. Open concept spaces can be difficult to keep a cohesive pallete so the warm neutral of the raw wood look will make it easier to pair all your finishes.

Also, avoid grey for open concept space - will be hard to create a cohesive look that is airy and it may look cold. The exception is if you use concrete and other stones as an accent stones. White is definitely okay for open concept - but all white everything is very blank-slate and trending out of style You would need to pair the white with some wood tones or other colors and then it could look really great.