A luxury hotel’s seven-month-old carpet revealed costly mistakes in specification,
installation, and ongoing maintenance, says Richard Renouf
IT was a prestigious country hotel and the owners were concerned that the carpet that had been installed seven months ago looked dirty and dishevelled so they raised this as an issue with the company who had project managed their refurbishment.
I met the project manager and the hotel manager and made a point of coming in the front door of the hotel.
There was a small coir mat and then a flagstone floor of some vintage with a well-worn rug in the centre of the entrance hall.
The carpet that I had come to look at was in a room to the left of this hallway and then in three dining rooms down the right hand side of the hotel. It was a flatweave which looked like sisal, but it was synthetic.
It looked dirty but I didn’t know what colour it was meant to be, so I went into the first room and lifted a rug and the contrast was clear.
I went from dining room to dining room and found a similar story. Each of them had doors directly out to the garden. This was well-manicured and clearly a popular spot to visit with a drink on good days.
The carpet in the dining room was badly snagged with some surface damage from abrasion, so it looked as if pets were welcome, but even if they weren’t, they clearly found their way in. And the walkways between the doorways across the flagstone floor were also heavily soiled and blackened a cleaning wipe with just one stroke.
Was this a case of soiling due to a lack of entrance/barrier matting to clean footwear before it came into contact with the carpet? After all, the carpet looks more like seven years than seven months old. Or was the carpet unsuitable for this setting?
Whatever my thoughts were at that stage, conclusions only come after a thorough inspection and consideration of all the factors, so I continued with the visit.
The scruffy appearance of the carpet wasn’t helped by the fact that it was coming loose in places around the perimeter and in the doorbars. I lifted a loose edge and found the carpet edge had not been sealed, which is essential on flatweaves and naturals. The warp yarns where the carpet had been cut were lifting and opening up for about 15 mm due to the structure of the weave.
What was also obvious was that the installer had used standard gripper with pins to try and fix the perimeter of a double-stuck installation. As the pins are set at 60deg and pointing towards the wall, when the carpet is laid into the adhesive it doesn’t sit on the pins and gives a bulge to the edge of the carpet which, in due course, results in the carpet edge lifting and fraying still further.
The doorbars and edge trims had also not been dressed down to hold the edge of the carpet.
A fitting problem, perhaps? Poor fitting was also confirmed when I found overcuts on external corners and places where the installer had folded back the carpet to cut it but had not taken adequate care and had also cut the loops of the pile underneath. Was this enough to form a conclusion?
When I’d finished looking at all the areas I had a short de-brief with the hotel manager and asked about how they had cleaned and maintained the carpet. Simple: vacuumed daily, she said. When I asked to see the vacuum I was ushered to the very back of the building and into a hidden room full of useful stuff that needed to be kept out of sight of clients.
The housekeeper proudly pointed to the tiny vacuum cleaner on the wall. So small it would take all day to do the ground floor of the hotel, and with such a small rechargeable battery it had very little ‘oomph’ (that’s a technical term of mine) and would maintain this for short bursts only.
Putting everything together, the state of the carpet was the result of several factors, most of which could be dealt with but the other factor had completely ruined the carpet.
The fundamental problem was the very poor fitting. Flatweaves are not like tufted or woven carpets and require specialist fitting to ensure the edges are sealed and don’t fray. They are also unforgiving when you put a knife against the surface, unlike pile carpets where a slash into the pile end-on may do little harm, although it should still be avoided.
The fraying of the edges and other issues would require this carpet to be replaced, but the project manager and hotelier needed to know about the other issues.
Fitting an expensive carpet without any consideration of how it will be used, and how soiling will be kept away from it, is folly. The specifiers knew this was a hotel and any reasonable walk around would show that soiling could be brought in to almost every room on the ground floor directly from the paving and lawns outside. This was a commercia setting and vital information that would have ensured a long-lasting installation had been overlooked. The carpet was of commercial grade, but that doesn’t make a carpet bullet-proof.
The third issue was that the carpet was not being maintained effectively. It would be easy to assume that a hotel would have the knowledge of how to maintain their premises in the best possible condition and would have the right equipment to carry out the maintenance effectively and reasonably quickly.
The three parties involved in this matter had all made assumptions that had resulted in a sorry looking installation. It hadn’t been specified, installed or maintained correctly, and each of the parties responsible ought to have been expert in their part of the contract!
www.richard-renouf.com
Richard Renouf is an independent flooring consultant