Get floored by new concepts
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Carpet tiles are what professionals at new-age office interiors are walking on. A look at the exciting features of the tile by RANJANI GOVIND
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Neat and stylish: InterfaceFlor’s carpet tiles are available in a range of colours and have a non-patterned look
How would you like your office with a carpeted floor, maintained just as a tile but has a soft cushiony feel on your foot? That’s carpet tiles for you from InterfaceFlor India (080-30589352; www.interfaceflor.eu), a modular flooring division of Interface Inc., Atlanta, U.S.
What are carpet tiles and how are they different from wall-to-wall carpets? Carpets are rolled and fixed on the floor, whereas carpet tiles, made of nylon stiff-weave and styled in tile format, have a structured backing made of fly ash, PVC, carbon and reinforced fibre-glass.
Where the latter stands to gain focus is in its usage, maintenance and interesting conservational production techniques. Carpet tile slabs can be removed individually during a spill-over or damage and can be replaced too. Both the sides – the yarn and the back — are recyclable, can be refurbished and re-used. “Nothing from the product enters the landfill”, say the InterfaceFlor authorities who issue a 15-year warranty on their product.
Says Raj Menon, Country Manager, InterfaceFlor India, “I started as a one-man army in India in 2001 when 12,000 square metres of carpet tile was being laid. But today, the Indian office market is floored by a whopping 6 lakh sq. m. of our carpet tiles, and the company is in the process of acquiring the U.S. Green Building LEED Rating for our office headquartered in Bangalore. We have offices in Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai along with manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Thailand, Australia, England, Ireland and the Netherlands. Our carpet tiles are sold in 110 countries.”
PropertyPlus thought it appropriate to get more details from Raj Menon on the nuances of their product application that is predominantly meant for office/commercial, hospitality and healthcare interior floorings.
Mr. Menon boasts of quality and eco-friendly manufacturing policies of his product range even as he speaks of the product lifespan — years and years — unless one gets floored by some latest design on offer!
Why would anyone choose a carpet tile today in favour of other floorings?
Every office is air-conditioned and carpet tiles are suitable for the closed atmosphere and the maintained-temperature that don’t allow dust to settle from open windows. You can walk about bare-foot and not a speck of dust will bother you. It is easy to install with minimum wastage…be it on a plain concrete floor or on existing tiled floors, the job is done within hours.
Facility managers love them as vacuuming is the key to daily maintenance, while dry shampooing and hot-water extraction of dirt would be yearly requirements. The indoor air quality doesn’t contribute to the so-called ‘sick office syndrome’ and carpet tiles are rated high for this quality by the international magazine Floor Focus that assimilates suggestions from 250 architects on a given subject.
Your range and price…
Aesthetically too, the range and colours available are plenty. They are fashioned to possess a non-structured and non-patterned look. We have interesting edging and laying techniques to create patterns to break the monotony.
Our design director, David Oakey, has a design vision based on bio-mimicry…emanating from natural wilderness with random patterns that are fused in soft pastels and loud bold hues. Our cost ranges from Rs. 120 to Rs. 300 per sq. ft.
Your organisation’s environment sustainability features…
Our founder Ray Anderson’s policies of sustainability have us moving away from traditional industrial approach of ‘take, make, waste’ to having a natural cyclical system of material and resource flows.
The Europe-based climate care organisation ‘Cool Carpet’ helps us in our endeavour to calculate the emissions of greenhouse gases in our product manufacture, from raw material acquisition to final recycle, and essentially know how much carbon dioxide is created during our product lifecycle.
This figure is then offset through investment in projects which reduce or reverse the impact of those emissions.
So we are supporting projects in renewable sources of energy and wind-farm projects helping electricity and irrigation production.
And in practical installation, our carpet tiles are fitted to the ground with ‘tackifier glue,’ an adhesive with low volatile organic compound (voc) which reduces the contamination level.
Global outlook also means getting sensitive to designers, architects and corporations who are concerned about the environmental impact of new building products entering the market.
We are indeed at an interesting interface of manufacture and concern!
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