“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.”
― Isaac Asimov

An accurate statement for commercial flooring.  The difference between an aesthetically pleasing installation and  horrible looking trip hazard is often the transition.   An inferior method of joining two flooring materials of varying heights is to install a transition.  This sticks out above the floor drawing attention to the transition and not the floor.  It is a trip hazard and is the weakest point in the floor.  Often I see floors that are performing properly after several years, only to have the transitions broken, or worse , completely gone.  This can be eliminated entirely by raising the subfloor height of the thinner flooring material up to meet the exact height of the thicker material.  If done correctly, the slope of the thinner floor is not even noticeable.  However, once you have an ugly transition installed, you have to leave a space in between the flooring. Once you leave the space, you are stuck with a transition and an inferior floor.  In a commercial application there should be no transitions higher than the finished floor.

When selecting a floor for your office, it can be overwhelming with the myriad of paint, flooring and furniture fabric choices.  This task is made harder when the person making the selection tries to perfectly match a color in the floor, to a color on the wall or in the furniture fabric.  This is an impossible task, and one that only leads to frustration.  There are a few lessons I have learned from designers over the years, that make this process much simpler. 

1.   Realize that you are not going to make everyone in your office happy.  Some do not care about the design aspect, some do care but quietly reserve judgment. Others will say it is ok, but its not how they would have done it.  Realize this going in, and focus on creating a pleasing environment and NOT pleasing the people in the environment.

2.  Match color families NOT colors.  I worked with a design legend in Waco Texas.  She could design an entire office in 20 minutes, and it would look fantastic.  She did this by sticking with color families not specific colors.  If the floors were jewel tones, then the walls and fabrics were jewel tones.  If the floors were pastels, then everything was pastels.  The specific colors didn't matter, the color families go together naturally.

3. Find the focus of a space.  Or put another way, what do you want to stand out?  Some of the most dramatic spaces I have installed have a muted floor, fabric and walls. Save one, the feature wall. This is where a jewel tone wall can add drama to a space.  But resist the urge to have a feature wall in every office.  It gets lost if you are trying to make a statement in every room.  Pick a prominent wall, but just one wall and give it a color from a different color family.  This is a technique that will not be ignored.

4. And lastly:  Always look at samples in your space. Natural light, or the lack of natural light affects color dramatically.  Never pick colors in a show room.




Follow these 4 tips and not only will your design be solid, but hopefully your stress will remain low, and you might actually enjoy the process.




Thanks for reading:

Frank New

Floor tile in high rise buildings can suffer from "COMPRESSION".  Compression is caused by the building shifting slightly(we are talking fractions of an inch).  The buildings are designed to shift to divert the effect of high consistent winds. It typically goes unnoticed, but it does become apparent in the ceramic flooring, mainly in the restrooms.  The reason it is confined to the restrooms has to do with the wall base used.  Many city zoning ordinances require a "sanitary base "  be used in public restrooms.   The photo on the left shows a sanitary base.  This  traps the floor tile in between the sanitary wall base.   It has no where  to expand and contract to when the building moves.  So, what happens is the weakest point of the floor pops loose.  This is typically not severe enough to create a tripping hazard, but just enough movement to cause the bond to break. When the bond breaks the floor is sitting on the dried mortar bed, which when walked on makes a crackling sound.  This sound will get worse over time.  You can re-install the loose tile and buy yourself some time, but the problem will return the next time the building flexes.  A permanent solution cannot be had until the wall base is changed, allowing the floor tile room to expand and contract with the movement of the building. If you are unsure about your tile situation, send me an email with your information, and I will drop by and see if we can figure it out together.  You can reach me at the following


[email protected]

Thanks for reading.
Frank New