Which flooring is suitable for underfloor heating?

can you say exactly what a design floor is?

Is it simply vinyl flooring under another name?

Unfortunately, I can't tell you, as we were not interested in it; it only came up in the conversation as an example for price development.

Design flooring is the umbrella term for PVC or vinyl floors that, for example, have a wood or tile look. There is not much naturalness to it. I would go for cork or parquet, possibly also (natural) wooden floor – all of which can be installed floating by yourself. I also don't think linoleum sheet material is so bad, but the installation is very demanding and should therefore be done by a professional.

Parquet is not just parquet and cork is not just cork. There are many differences. Varnished, oiled, dyed, smoked, planed, brushed, country house plank from XXL to S, ship floor, 2-layer, 3-layer etc. Take a few hours/days to do some research, then you will be wiser...

I have only seen design flooring in PVC, it's basically plastic in a fancy way

We have it everywhere as the glued version, we really like it and it's affordable

Parquet is premium, but we couldn't afford it

Hi,

What kind of parquet would you recommend? We would like to lay the floor floating with a click mechanism, is that also recommended for parquet?

For parquet, I would always choose oiled only, not lacquered. With lacquered, you see every scratch and can hardly repair them. Oiled parquet is definitely much easier.
But: Forget about the floating installation with parquet! Unlike laminate, it expands significantly with different humidity levels (summer vs. winter) and then warps accordingly. This leads to creaking floors, and in large rooms (= span from wall to wall more than 6 m) it can happen that the parquet elements touch the wall in summer and push up even though you have a 15-20 mm gap from the wall in winter (which the baseboard can hardly cover anymore). We have this movement in our living room (span 7.5 m) and at some point we will take it up again and glue it down firmly.
I also insisted on installing it myself and therefore laid it floating. It was even worse upstairs, where we installed it without transition strips (explicitly approved by the manufacturer) and it warped in summer so much that it creaked like in a 500-year-old castle. The only thing missing was the castle ghost. When the parquet had to be renewed after water damage, I had it glued down firmly.

Also, floating installation is not that cheap either. _Good_ impact sound insulation quickly costs 8-12 €/sqm (about the same as parquet adhesive) and you need many finishing profiles and transition strips that really add up if you want good quality.

In the basement, we laid good laminate floating, which was and is completely hassle-free.

So, my advice:
You can safely lay laminate floating, there is really good stuff out there.
Parquet should only be glued down firmly. After seeing how it works, I would trust myself to do it as well. It’s not rocket science.

Best regards,

Andreas

For every inquiry about a flooring that can be installed by oneself and is not too expensive, I mention the bamboo parquet. Strangely enough, none of the questioners give it any recognition. Most of them, because they actually want an answer about the desired oak parquet. And why don’t you?