Some restaurants can be truly magical places. The décor, the fittings, the ambience – in other words, good design and a lot of it. Most people notice a lot of things about restaurant interior design but don’t know a lot about carpet issues in design or other commercial flooring. The flooring, as a matter of fact, happens to be the main component of any interior design. It’s the biggest single surface in any design.
Good restaurants put a lot of effort and hard work into their interior design. It’s a selling point, it creates a good environment, and let’s face it, it’s also a major competitive edge. Décor is to restaurants as important as the menu in many ways. It’s a drawcard. People remember décor in restaurants, and they react to it, either positively or negatively.
For restaurants, décor is a sort of ongoing saga of aesthetics. People don’t want to eat in a “hostile” aesthetic environment. The old 1950s diners, for example, were the preliminary interior design for the modern fast food takeaway restaurants. Unlike the diners and takeaways, restaurants want their customers to stay and eat.
That means that restaurant interiors are really a sort of project management for restaurant operators. Most restaurants prefer carpet as their flooring, for various reasons:
- They’re aesthetically pleasant
- They’re good, flexible, creative mediums for design
- They’re “friendlier” surfaces than hard flooring
- They’re safer surfaces for public traffic with no “slip” issues
For upmarket restaurants, it’s really no choice. Carpet is the better option in too many ways. However, that naturally raises the question of what sort of carpet is to be used. There are some issues here, too:
- Broadloom carpet is expensive to install.
- Carpet has to be able to manage spills.
- Maintenance and repair of carpet can be costly and time consuming.
- Design issues are complex, and old-style carpets can be costly to customize.
Fortunately for restaurant operators, technology and new carpet designs and manufacturing techniques show the way out of this potentially expensive set of problems.
New Carpet Technology
A new generation of carpets has evolved, largely as a result of the shortcomings of old-style carpets but also because of new sustainable manufacturing ideas:
- New carpet tiles, which have their own individual backing, eliminate the old underlay issues and costs.
- These carpet tiles are glued together, forming a single surface. This means there are no seams or other typical weak points in the carpet surface.
- The carpet tiles can be removed and replaced in minutes, not hours, as in the case of the old broadloom carpets.
- The tiles are very durable, long-life products. They’re designed to take a lot of wear and tear. Many airports use these tiles specifically because of their toughness.
- The new technology also includes full customization options. It’s literally possible to “design” a carpet selection online and use special visualization technology to see the pattern in place.
As you can see, this technology is an interior designer’s dream come true. The carpet tile approach eliminates all of the major issues with old style carpets. The technology reduces cost across the entire spectrum of expensive issues for restaurants. If you’re looking for better carpet and better design choices, check this out.
