Black floor paint - your experiences please?

[HelenHywater]

I currently have my floorboards painted in Farrow & Ball floor paint. It's a nice colour but not hard wearing enough. I need to repaint.

I'm wondering whether to use the Rustoleum PU paint instead, or whether to use F&B/Little Greene (which appears to be highly rated) and to paint a layer of the rustoleum clear PU paint on top.

Has anyone painted their flooboards black and is happy with the results?

We have floors painted in F&B, a sort of pale grey, and it is reasonably hard wearing. We have pets who scratch it, but we only repaint about every four or five years.

I would not use black as it will suck all the light out of the room.

We have black floorboards and I love them, although we have a large rug in the centre of the room. I initially picked black as the edge of the room had a dark brown border, typical in a lot of Victorian properties and I couldn't face sanding away the border. Everyone said black would be dark and grim, it's not at all.
We used Dulux Woodsheen in Ebony, it does peel quite easily, but it is at least easy to touch up and re-coat. In fairness to Dulux it does say not suitable for floors, it has been down for several years now and still looks good with the occasional touch up. The colour is a nice black, with a slight hint of brown, not an inky or completely jet black.

In contrast we painted another floor white, it was a rushed restyle, I just used a can of B&Q waterbased satinwood, didn't prep properly and it has been shockingly hard wearing. White is a terrible, terrible choice though 😅

I can see it would work well when it's the edges of the room with a large rug over the centre. But in that situation the floor pain wouldn't need to be 'hardwearing' as the rug would take the majority of the traffic, which makes me think she doesn't have large rugs. I could be wrong though!

In fairness our rug isn't over any of the high traffic areas and even though it's a large rug - 6' diameter, it's a very large room.

Yes I see what you mean, we have one in the lounge like that.

I think a large rug to balance out dark floor paint would make it work well. I was envisaging no rug.

We have dark wall paint in one room, it's a lovely colour but I now regret as it makes the room so dark (and it will take at least three coats of paint to cover it...😐)

I have a hankering for dark forest green walls in my lounge (with the black floor!), but I know I would regret it.

Previously I had all the floorboards painted white - I agree that this is not a good choice. It showed all of the dirt (and I have a lot with pets and kids). Black isn't brilliant for showing dust, but it is better. I did previously have dark walls too and the house looked amazing. I've now painted all the walls brilliant white as I was hankering for light.

@FollowingSeas are your floors slightly gloss? Mine are matt and I'm wondering about having a shiny finish. My walls were painted in various shades of dark blue, purple and pink and looked amazing with the dark floors!

I will be having rugs in larger areas so it isn't just a vast expanse of black. I'm happy with the colour but just need something that doesn't scratch so easily on the stairs mostly.

Rustoleum chalk floor paint is excellent, not sure if they have black paint, low prep and sticks well, black will show every speck of dust though.

Mine are all satin, so just have a subtle sheen. I always feel matt would scuff, although I have no evidence to back that up!
The issue with the white is any gaps in old boards look really obvious, but if you fill the gaps then the dirt gets trapped where the filler is. Not a good look.
The satin black does show bigger specks of dust a bit, but it's so easy to give it a quick sweep, I guess gloss would show more.