Looking for a medium brown stain to replace our (now) very orange floors on red oak for a 1915 historic home that's a bit arts and crafts/prairie blend. Want some warmth (don't like the look of cold gray or no warm undertones) but not straight pink/red, and something lower maintenance as it relates to cleaning, scratching, and dog hair ideally. Narrowed it down to 50/50 medium brown and weathered oak blend (leftmost) and Early American (rightmost). From all the pictures, I expected Early American to be darker than this sample and show more grain contrast. It's on a stair tread that is the same wood and I've been moving it around and still seems light and seems to blend in the grain more. Maybe that's okay though.
I put Golden Brown in the middle for comparison which we have in our bedroom and I like, but it's mostly covered with a rug anyways.. coordinating with that room isn't critical.
Questions: 1. opinions on the choice between those two? 2. Will lighter stain show more variation board to board presumably? We also replaced some stair treads with new wood. That is a concern as some boards are much lighter/darker. I saw another post of someone unhappy with Early American for this reason but most pictures of it really hit the mark.
I think I don't love the business of the pronounced grain shown in the 50/50 blends as that will make the overall floor much darker. I do like the tone where it's not the grain. Again, this sample seems much darker than the examples I saw from Katie jeans post using this combination back in 2019.
I expected these two to be very similar based on Internet sleuthing yet they appear to be very different darkness for my samples! Maybe it's the random email of the boards....
Open to thoughts-thanks!