The horizontal floor plane carpeted or smooth, wipe-clean or impossible to tidy shapes the life lived aboveI start from the floor. Everything sits ontop of it; it is the surface I am most often in contact with. The floor is key to the pleasure of the room. I am following my sevenmonthold daughter in my enthusiasm for flooring. She has led me to pay more attention to the ground. It is her domain, her knees and hands gripping and sliding as she makes her way across thefloor she is a connoisseur of friction.As soon as she started becoming more ambitious in her movement, we bought a big padded mat. At first it felt uncanny having asoft floor covering on top of the familiar floorboards. I had not expected the mat to take up so much space. Too big to roll away, we now share the cushioning with her. But Ihave come to like it; sometimes I wonder how long I will be able to keep it on the floor, surely not forever. But the soft surface is so generous, so kind to the soles of my feet.The actress Jayne Mansfield carpeted not only the floor of the pink bathroom in her Los Angeles mansion, but also the walls and ceilingCredit:Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection / ShutterstockIt makes me think of deeppile carpets, like the ones in my neighbours house when Iwas a child. But then I was nervous about the impossibly thick shag. I understood from my friend that his mother was very protective of them. The carpets were pale throughout the house, with different colours indifferent places. In the hallways and onthe staircase, they were pale pink, inother rooms an offwhite. The thickest carpet was reserved for rooms we were not allowed to play in: the parents bedroom andthe sitting room. My nervousness about somehow damaging this carpet has made deeppile carpet feel almost embarrassing, perhaps also because of how sensuous it felt in contrast to the floors inthe house we lived in: tired vinyl, paintspattered bricks, wornout cork and motheaten carpet.I like carpet, but I am not sure I am clean enough for itI like carpet, but I am not sure I am clean enough for it. At the height of 90s deep pile, I was at primary school, and a favourite book was Terry Pratchetts The Carpet People, which imagined an entire society living in the forests and detritus of the furnished floor. This is the advantage of the babys mat it is wipe-clean. The mother of an exgirlfriend had a bathroom with carpet in it, and the carpet was covered by further rugs and mats in a sort of patchwork arrangement. It felt good on my feet to step out of the bath and onto that floor and feel itmould to my soles. It was fun to walk across from one mat to another like a sort ofunstitched quilt laid out on the floor, waiting to be patched together.Nothing can be too soft for my daughter. Ifeel strongly that she must be protected at all costs. But hard surfaces are her current preference. I am writing this from an apartment with hardwood floors: narrow chestnutcoloured strips of wood tightly arranged in parallel strips. A simple parquet design. It has just the right combination offriction and grip to allow her to crawl rapidly across it. Her bare feet get just the right traction she needs to slide herself along. She polishes it as she goes. I think mostly I have lived with wooden floors, but this floor is altogether different from those. Instead of dark whorls, gaps between planks and the occasional exposed nail, this floor lies perfectly flat.In Carpet Furniture (1993) by artist Andrea Zittel, the furniture of daily life is abstracted into two-dimensional CAD block-style plans, projected onto moveable rugsCredit: Andrea Zittel. Courtesy the ArtistI like the perfection of a smooth floor and admire the madness of geometric perfection. In the obsessive house that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein helped to design forhis sister in Vienna, he insisted on millimetre perfection, driving architects andbuilders to distraction with his total conviction. The floors of the house are madewithout skirting boards and the floors and walls meet in perfect perpendicular agreement. The floor is also used to disguise the window coverings metal shutters are lowered into the floor with a complex system of pulleys. His sister said it was more of ahouse for gods than it was for humans.Rugs can be laid on top of smooth floors, adorned with abstract shapes like the ones that Anni Albers designed. There is a beautiful design from 1928 for a small rug for a childs room. Reds, greys, yellows and pinks alternate in rotating arrangements ina chequerboard pattern that gives the impression of also being striped because ofthe shifting colours. Or the 1958 Drawing fora Nylon Rug, which takes a more sinuous form with a red striped rope appearing to tie itself into one endless knot on a blue background. Rugs are good because you canuse them to cover things up, and you canbeat them outside to get rid of some ofthe carpet people.It is good to have a floor that you can sweep. Parquet floors reveal the shame of anuntidy life, the dust and detritus of your day picked out by sunlight. Not just dead skin and bits of grit brought in on your shoes or shed from your head, but also the little objects that I constantly leave behind: receipts, pennies, the plastic cover of a straw from a juice carton, a piece of hair. Itis easy to see on a hard and smooth floor. A more decorative floor would hide the dirt.The asrotos ikos, or unswept floor, was a type of mosaic that decorated the floors of some ancient Greek and Roman dining rooms, depicting the detritus of a banquet.Credit:Dmitriy Moroz / AlamyIn ancient Rome there was a fashion for mosaics which depicted some of the things that might be left on the floor after a banquet. The motif was referred to with theancient Greek words for unswept floor: asrotos ikos. The best example is in the Vatican Museum, covered in grape stalks, crab legs, animal bones and even a walnut being eaten by a mouse. That would work well for me on my floor, but with receipts, weeksold bits of newspaper, pens, baby toys and tons of dust instead. What heaven to have a floor which is impossible to tidy.On top of the smooth mosaic, depicting allthe detritus of a day, I would like rugs arranged in a sort of patchwork, sometimes piled on top of one another. Some soft, others rougher on my bare feet. And the baby and I will make it our entire world as we crawl across it, knocking over toys and building elaborate train tracks. A perfect plane. I think the floor will be enough.Explore the good rooms series, a collection of domestic spaces made, imagined or described by architects, curators and writersLead image: The parquet planks of London Plain, a 2020 installation by Olu Ogunnaike, were gradually removed by visitors during the course of the exhibition2025-01-08Reuben J BrownShare AR December 2024/January 2025Good rooms + AR HouseBuy Now