Direction of laying parquet / parallel or perpendicular to the hallway?

Good morning everyone,

the often asked question now applies to me as well: in which direction should I lay my parquet flooring.
On the ground floor we have 20 cm wide planks, between 2 and sometimes 6 m long.
On the upper floor the same lengths, but only 15 cm wide.

We are gluing down the floor ourselves, meaning we lay the planks through the doors as well, without an expansion joint.
Only the toilets and the technical room are tiled, the rest will be wood (including the kitchen area).

I tend to lay them parallel to the hallway, both on the ground floor and upper floor.
That would be against the “rule” that you should preferably enter the room across the direction of the planks. The stair steps would also be perpendicular to the direction of the planks.
However, the light would fall parallel to the planks, which is how it should be done, I read somewhere.

The pictures are roughly arranged according to the cardinal points, so the top is north, meaning we have the evening sun coming from the right in our living room and on the upper floor through the large right hallway window.

What do you think, how would you do it?

I’m grateful for any opinion!

Best regards from southern Baden,
Simon

The floorboards visually extend the room in the direction of installation. A long, narrow hallway should therefore be laid crosswise, otherwise it will appear even narrower than it already is.

And that is actually the only room that is somehow really stretched in one direction. The others are all rather square, if you consider kitchen and living room as separate rooms. In this respect, I would also rather lay it across the hallway.

The floor layer just has a cut piece in every row. Very labor-intensive.

One should therefore lay a long, narrow hallway crosswise,

True. But there is no long, narrow hallway here. It is comfortably wide and opens up in width after the stairs. In this respect, everything is fine. By the way, we also have a lengthwise layout with a width of 2 meters, but not wooden planks, rather rectangular tiles. That fits.

But cutting across is not a problem. Cutting lengthwise is more of an issue. For professionals, no problem, for amateurs it's tricky. If the wall is not completely straight, it gets really tricky. So for DIY work, that's actually an argument for cutting across the hallway.

, yes, on the ground floor it opens into the room, but on the upper floor it is already very elongated.