Real Wood/Engineered Wood vs Laminate Flooring

Hi,

I had a search through previous threads and there are bits and pieces on this but nothing that quite gets to the bottom of my query which is...

We have an old cottage that has a tiled kitchen and dining area - which we don't like. It's a colder part of the house and the tiles add to the coldness!

We want to lay some sort of wooden flooring over the tiles. We've had a look and seen some nice higher end laminates. We always thought we'd go for a real wood floor to try to retain the character of the house. However, in any store we've visited we've been warned away from real wood (more difficult to fit and maintain and may not be suitable for colder area).

Our main question is whether a laminate floor will diminish the character of the house (it's an old country cottage and the previous owners went to a good deal of trouble to maintain the character).

Another option is engineered wood - although there's a fair difference in price between most laminates and engineered wood - and we haven't seen an engineered wood that we've liked yet.

Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated.

I've done up a cottage recently and I put down laminate. I'm very happy with it and I think it works in well with the character of the place.

Canadia - I put in Rustic Oak and it works perfectly - not too dark - the room has deep windows and darker laminate would have made the room too dark.

Thanks PaddyBloggit - we're definitely going down the road of a lighter coloured wood. We have a lightish real oak floor in the sitting room and we don't want it too far off in colour from that.