As wellbeing remains a key design influence, Louisa Eyles shares her expertise on how
LVT flooring can support visual and non-visual zoning.
COMMERCIAL flooring delivers more than aesthetics and durability. It’s an essential tool, especially with the growing focus on wayfinding, wellness, and inclusive design trends.
In all sectors and industries, improving ease of wayfinding facilitates, creates positive feelings and experiences for occupants, including neurodiverse individuals. Repetitive layouts and lack of visual cues can make it easy for anyone to get lost, however, making small design changes can improve navigation and help employees, customers or visitors understand the intended function of a room or space.
For instance, visual zoning using colour is an effective way for people to identify quiet workstations in offices. Equally, it can help with navigation around a building or locating communal areas in build-to-rent developments. Zoning can be easily achieved with LVT flooring in two ways, by adding a perimeter plank border and bespoke number pattern in the ‘assigned’ colours for each floor, or opting for contrasting planks and tiles in different areas. If subtle visual zoning is required, contractors can take a considered approach by layering LVT designs in woods and stones. The methods work well and meet the demand for inclusive design.
However, there’s more to LVT flooring than colours and decors. Simply put, high-quality manufactured flooring can be specified and laid in many ways that help demarcate zones. For example, Amtico flooring was chosen for the multi-use amenity spaces at The Headline building in Leeds. Here, an innovative combination of laying patterns with colours and woods enabled the spaces to be functional and visually appealing for the residents. The flooring’s subtle cues made it clear which zones were for entertaining, relaxing, and working.
It’s clear good design has a positive impact on occupants. We’re seeing more designers and contractors take a ‘resimercial’ approach in workplace projects, a hybrid of ‘residential’ and ‘commercial’ design. This trend is increasingly prominent in office projects where flooring design is used to demarcate specific departments, including meeting, ‘town hall’ areas or quiet workspaces. Such variations show companies recognise their employees’ need for personal space, while safeguarding the familiar office culture which encourages collaboration, productivity, and creativity.
We’ve also seen floor designs increase in scale as interiors specialists choose a combination of small and large format tiles to divide open-plan spaces using materials or colour. In addition, key areas can be defined in subtle, but design-led ways using material and texture combinations, such as LVT in marble or aged oak designs. This provides pattern and detail, as opposed to relying on abstract shapes and strong contrasts of colour to outline a zone.
Consequently, with the evolution of integrated design solutions, zones shouldn’t be regarded as isolating or separating a space visually. For example, specifying safety flooring in a stone decor from Amtico’s Spacia 36+ collection for a tea point area that requires enhanced slip-resistance, while fitting the same decor in the standard LVT version to the perimeter without creating any visual interruptions. Given there’s much potential with LVT, it’s best to work with flooring manufacturers to help bring project ideas to life.
It’s vital to create the right experience for the user and LVT makes this simple, as it can be integrated seamlessly. Regardless of trends, design-based or otherwise, flooring will always have many roles to fulfil and LVT will continue to grow and establish itself as the top choice for commercial projects.
01217 450800
info@amtico.com
www.amtico.com
Louisa Eyles is head of commercial marketing at Amtico
