In response to competitive pressures from luxury vinyl tile and hardwood flooring, laminate suppliers are ratcheting up their style and design efforts to add increasingly realistic visuals to their collections.

“What we’re seeing, and what is working well are products with more texture—handscraped emulations, registered embossed,” said Will Osborne, operations manager for the residential division at Pierce Flooring & Design, which operates eight stores in six Montana cities. “We’re seeing more sophisticated coloring—two-tone and multi-tone stain appearances, a French bleed look if you will.”

For laminate suppliers like Mannington, styling influences on the market are reflected in rustic, handscraped and time worn plank visuals, according to David Sheehan, vice president of the resilient and laminate business.

Here are some of the popular style and design choices:

1. Long plank/wide plank. A hot trend on the West Coast, long plank is quickly moving East, executives said. “Long plank’s time has finally come,” said Milton Goodwin, vice president, product management, laminate and ceramic, Armstrong. “Laminate offers value vs. real wood, and long plank in hardwood is very costly.” Wide planks are also coming on strong, especially anything registered embossed.

“Longer length is adding to the benefits of the floor,” Osborne said.

Sheehan said the mill’s new Longwood Collection, introduced at Surfaces, has captured the attention of the industry. “What makes it unique is not only its size—7.87 inches wide by 80.63-inches long—but also its styling.”

2. High gloss. Floors with the high-gloss finish are still selling, although perhaps not at previous levels. Still, high-gloss products, particularly those with beveled edges, continue to be strong performers. One dealer said the high-gloss Grand Illusions from Armstrong continues to resonate with his customers.

3. Handscraped. There is a renewed emphasis on the handscraped look, which continues to be one of the best-selling visuals in laminate. “The hottest product for us right now is our new mixed-width handscraped product from our Left Bank collection,” said Eric Erickson, laminate category manager, Shaw Industries. New handscraped and exotic looks continue to flow into the market even as the pace of sales has dipped.

4. Hardwood visuals. Consumers want beauty, and Armstrong’s Goodwin said the goal is to provide retailers with a unique selling proposition: products with high-end luxury styling and durable performance characteristics. To that end, Armstrong earlier this year brought out new premium floors with very unique, white-washed and handscraped visuals—exact replicas of unique looks borrowed from its premium wood flooring line, Goodwin said.

The latest trendsetting product from Mohawk includes its GenuEdge Technology, which delivers extremely realistic hardwood edge visuals. GenuEdge is used in Quick•Step Veresque and Mohawk Barrington products. Roger Farabee, vice president of marketing, Unilin Flooring and Mohawk Hard Surfaces, said GenuEdge “achieves a level of realism that is unmatched” in laminate flooring today. “Consumers will struggle to see the difference between real wood and our laminate planks featuring GenuEdge,” he said.

5. Stones and ceramics. Ceramic looks remain a relatively small part of the overall business, but they comprise an “extremely important segment and one that we feel we have a competitive advantage,” Sheehan said. Mannington’s application of narrower grout lines that truly emulate the look and feel of natural stone or ceramic have been a consistent winner. And new on the market this summer is the Weathered Way collection from Armstrong, which replicates the look of tumbled stone in a random block format. It comes in four colors with an emphasis on grays and beiges.