Flooring

Advances
Flooring

Radical Rubber Surfaces

Tarkett has expanded its rubber flooring offerings with two new collections including Rubber Textures and Pentagonals. Rubber Textures represents popular, classic timeless designs in 14 basic textures including forged, wood grain and woven, hammered, linen, Leather, Brushed, Concrete, Rice Paper, Flagstone, Raised Round, Raised Square, Bamboo and Cubis. Five additional textures are available within the Circulinity series: Fast Lane, Effervescent, Tic Tac Toe, Tricycle and Roundabout. Pentagonals rubber flooring offers three unique shapes that contribute to a floors scale, design and aesthetic depending on the composition and color scheme. The intriguing and artistic shapes shell, monument an

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Residential Tower at 165 North Desplaines, Chicago
Case Study
Flooring

Finding Daylight

Architect Donald G. Copper LEED AP, of G|R|E|C Architects’ design for a residential tower in a dense urban neighborhood in Chicago brings unexpected daylight into the building. The 15-story, 199-unit apartment building is in a dense area of Chicago with very little green space, guiding the desire for incorporating daylight as a design priority. To connect the stairs to the loft library and the building offices, instead of using concrete, carpet, and other materials that would darken the space, Copper used translucent glass. The glass catwalk brings daylight into the area while still being highly usable and functional. The glass, LITEFLAM XT 60, allows light reflections through the glas

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Advances
Flooring

Underfoot Performance

Adhesive-free, vinyl flooring Altro Cantata features decorative, soft-look shades ideal for medium to heavy traffic spaces. Installed at up to 97% internal relative humidity even without a damp-proof membrane. The flooring’s easy cleaning and maintenance regime ensures that Cantata maintains its striking shades and performance. Ideal for healthcare, its adhesive-free installation means it can be laid straight down on to existing flooring. 

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Case Study
Flooring

Flooring Install Remedy for Neuro Intensive Care Unit

UW Health’s University Hospital in Madison, Wis., sought to reduce noise and improve the patient and staff experience in its newly renovated, 18-bed Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit (Neuro ICU). Installing an ergonomic healthcare flooring product provided the solution. Located on the fourth floor of University Hospital, the 13,000-sq.-ft. Neuro ICU was previously a rehab unit for orthopedics. That population moved to the newly built UW Health Rehabilitation Hospital. Administrators decided more high-acuity intensive care beds were needed, and as a result, the new Neuro ICU was created. The Neuro ICU project marks the first year of a multi-year renovation to add ICU rooms. According to

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Advances
Flooring

Tile Origins

Clé cement tile plays on the word clay, and these playful cement designs add to the style vernacular for interior tile, giving an aesthetic that complements sleek and modern settings by adding warmth and unexpected color and form. Available in seven unique shapes and 50 colors, the tiles are hand-crafted in the traditional encaustic method. Combine tiles with contrasting shapes and grout for an artistic feature wall inside and out. 

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Advances
Flooring

Safe & Durable

All J+J Kinetex products now offer the International Living Future Institute’s Declare label. Kinetex advanced textile composite flooring combines key attributes of a soft surface floor covering with the long-wearing performance characteristics of hard-surface flooring. Its latest designs, Foundry, Put a Cork In It and Tri-Plex are shown here. Put a Cork In It is a 24-in. × 24-in. tile with multi-tonal cork-like flecks scattered through 16 colorways and Tri-Plex is a 24-in. × 24-in. modular tile with modern patterning and crisp color. 

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Advances
Flooring

Tile the Town

An outdoor trend to come out of Cevisama was the variety of ceramic pavers that bring orderly and beautiful hardscapes to the landscape. The 2-cm thick pavers are lightweight and easily cut and installed onsite. In addition to 24-in. × 24-in. formats, Tile of Spain companies offer 16-in. × 32-in. and 24-in. × 48-in. plank-like pavers that may be cut down to form still slimmer 12- or 8-in. planks. Paver aesthetics include flagstone and cobblestone looks featuring softly weathered edges, cottos and French limestone looks.

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Advances
Flooring

A Nordic Influence on Interiors

Mannington’s Norwegian Oak hardwood is lightly washed and wire-brushed to subtly reflect the character of the wood, then dual-stained in a matte finish for a calm, restful feel. Featuring 6-in. wide planks, sawn in random lengths, the flooring collections features the manufacturer’s patented ScratchResist performance coating, for resistance to everyday scratches, keeping it looking newer for longer.

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With cascading windows gleaming throughout, the apartments grant its guests views of downtown.
Case Study
Flooring

Flooring Revolutionizes Chicago Apartments

Built upon the torn-down Gonnella Bakery, Spoke Apartments’ new construction brings 10,000 sq. ft. of retail space sandwiched between two towers of one-and-two-bedroom luxury apartments, townhouses and penthouse suites. Flooring provided the finishing touch. Gensler’s Chicago branch, working with architecture firm FitzGerald Assocs., designed the interior amenities and individual units at the Spoke Towers. Angela Harper, senior associate at Gensler, said that they conducted much research on cost, thickness, durability, sound properties and aesthetics from different luxury vinyl tile (LVT) products across the industry.

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Case Study
Flooring

Flooring Provides Stylish Pathway to Sustainability

Request for custom mixed flooring proves no deterrent in implementing an underfloor access system to achieve comfort and performance goals, including greater daylight harvesting. The design for these floors needed to convey a high-end professional feel while maintaining the benefits which had been achieved using an access floor system. The architectural firm of Mark Cavagnero Assocs. had a clear vision of materials: teak plank wood, multi-piece porcelain and carpet. The challenge became how to blend these varying materials as transitions and maintain the functionality of the access floor system. At 30-stories and 450,000 sq. ft., 350 Mission Street is the first LEED Platinum high-rise in th

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