Retail and showrooms

The floor is the largest continuous surface in a shop interior. A seamless floor makes a space look larger, with no line cutting across the customer route. At the same time it is the first element to look worn: at the entrance, at the till and on the route to the fitting rooms. We select on the combination of appearance and wear resistance at those busy points; a matt finish hides signs of use considerably better than a high-gloss finish, which matters in a showroom with a lot of raking light.

In a roll-out across several branches the difficulty is consistency rather than the floor itself. Colour, gloss level and texture must be identical in every store, even months apart, which requires a fixed protocol: the same system, a recorded colour specification and matched production batches. Branches close one at a time, often only at night or on Sundays, so the whole sequence is planned in advance. With fast-curing systems a floor is often walkable within 24 hours, so the store opens as usual the next morning.

A retail format typically changes its appearance every five to seven years, so we advise a system that can later be refinished in a new colour rather than removed entirely. Local repairs are possible on a seamless system without redoing the whole floor; at handover we record the system and colour so that a repair years later still matches.