Floor Covering News just published its annual social media guide and this year, they picked me to write an article about how businesses can use Twitter to their advantage.
As amazed as I was by the baths I saw at Cersaie this year, it is a tile show primarily. It's just ten times the size of any tile show I've ever seen.
For the last couple of years, tile innovations have centered on improvements in printing technologies and stone-like tile continues to look more and more like natural stone with each passing model year. Still growing is the segment dedicated to making plank-shaped tile that looks very much like wood.
I knew all of that before I ever boarded a plane for Bologna and I was hoping to see something new, and I mean new in the tile world. Well I found it, the key words coming out of Cersaie were texture and shape. Of all the manufacturers' shapes and textures I saw, the manufacturer who showed off their innovations best was Spain's Apavisa. So much so that they called their very large booth an art gallery. They weren't kidding.
Do to the fact that these tiles don't lay flat, they can only be used on walls. But imagine the possibilities presented with some of these shapes and twists on traditional wall tile.
Here are some highlights from their booth in Bologna. Bear with me, there are a ton of photos to share here.
Can you see yourself using some of these textures in your own home? They're onto something here and keep an eye out for other manufacturers to start playing around with shapes.
At Cersaie in Bologna last September I saw all kinds of amazing innovations and new products, many of which were making their world debut in Bologna that week. Worldwide, the tile industry is more properly known as the ceramics industry, and a large component of the world ceramics industry is bath design.
Two Italian manufacturers came up with interesting ways to deal with a shower pan this year and both companies are onto what I say is the next big thing in shower design. The first of these innovations is Rapsel's Pianolegno. I'm showing it here with their Pluviae shower fixture.
By the way, Pianolegno means wooden floor in Italian and Pluviae is French for rain.
The Pianolegno is a teak grid that fits into a stainless steel shower pan that's been countersunk into the floor. The pan looks like this and can also be used on its own without the teak inserts.
Here's how it looked when I saw it at Rapsel's booth at Cersaie. It's been paired here with Rapsel's Cobra shower.
Another great innovation I saw in this department is the Volo from Flaminia. Volo means flight for what it's worth.
The Volo is a ceramic, basket weave grate that sits in a ceramic pan. That pan can be countersunk into the floor or it can sit on top of the floor. If it's sitting on the floor, it's make a small step up obviously.
Granted, these two products are still kind of edgy to North American eyes, but could you ever see using something like this in your own home? Does the idea of a shower without a curb, meaning it's flush with the floor appeal to you?
For as long as I've been part of the Kitchen and Bath Industry, I've believed the maxim that undermounting a sink with a laminate counter was impossible. But then last January I found myself the guest of Blanco at the trade show IMM in Cologne. It was at Blanco's booth that I saw this.
That is a porcelain kitchen sink that's been undermounted to a laminate counter. I'd never seen anything like it and it kind of blew my mind.
Here's a close up of the edge of that sink.
I chalked it up as just one more of those things that would never cross the Atlantic.
Then a couple of months ago at Cersaie in Bologna I saw this vanity by Duravit. Sure enough, that's another undermounted sink with a laminate counter.
Around the corner from that display was a cross section of one of these installations.
Remarkable.
Well yesterday morning I was on Twitter as I'm wont to do and I started having a conversation with the Formica Corporation (@FormicaGroup) and two designers from England, Marion John (@Majjie) and Russ Buckley(@russrb).
The topic turned to undermounting sinks with laminate counters and I showed them those photos of the Duravit displays I'd seen in Italy. Then Formica posted this photo of an undermounted stainless sink in a counter laminated in their Calacatta Marble pattern from their 180fx Series.
After ten minutes of oooohs and ahhhhs and trying to figure out how on earth you could make a waterproof seal in an installation like that, Formica pulled out this video from Karran sinks.
Mystery solved.
Now, this won't work with just any sink and the labor involved will not make this an inexpensive option. However, should you find an installer willing to do this, you can now show him or her a video that explains how to do it. Thanks Formica and thanks Karran for making this information public.
In the last 11 months I've been fortunate to attend nearly 20 trade venues in six countries and in each of those venues I've seen such things that I thought my eyes were deceiving me half the time. Due to my experiences in Europe in particular, I've come to see solid surface in a whole new way. This post is illustrated with sinks and vanities designed by Marike Andeweg and her Netherlands-based studio, Not Only White. Not Only White's work is a great example of using solid surface in a new, and stunning way.
Throughout my design career, I'd been conditioned to turn up my nose at solid surface whenever and wherever I saw it. I'm old enough to remember when Corian hit the market and I still cringe at the thought of coral-colored Corian with white swirls.
When I started designing kitchens, the move to granite counters was just getting underway and anyone who was designing then pushed stone over solid surface in our quests to deliver high-end designs. My solid surface sample boxes sat unloved and unused for years.
My bias against solid surface seemed hard-wired.
But a funny thing happened as I was walking around at IMM in Cologne last January. There was solid surface everywhere. There were counters of course, but also furniture, sinks, vanities and more accessories than I could count.
A couple of weeks later in Spain I saw solid surface toilets and bathtubs. The stuff was all over Europe it seemed. I saw Not Only White's brilliant sinks and vanities at 100% Design in London's Earl's Court in September. I was in London as part of the inaugural Blog Tour and by then my knee-jerk, bad reaction to solid surface was but a memory and I could appreciate the beauty of Not Only White's products.
And they are beautiful. They use solid surface in a way that makes jaded design people like me stop and think, "Oooooh, what's that?" I love the idea that their hand washing sinks are so small, that their vanity sinks are so shallow and use interesting drains and I love the simplicity of all of it.
