From biometric rugs to customizable carpets,
DOMOTEX’s Framing Trends area reflected
the future of flooring.
Words
SHONQUIS MORENO
AT DOMOTEX IN JANUARY, Hannover’s
Deutsche Messe was packed floor to ceiling
with design that continues to integrate the
floor into the rest of the interior. Domotex
2018 shone a spotlight not just on personal-
ized flooring products and services in a
time of deepening uniformity, but also on
the industry’s potential to generate unique-
ness, artistry and even wellbeing. With more
than 1,400 exhibitors from 61 countries, the
trade fair debuted an exhibition layout in
which product segments were presented in
clusters to give a clarified overview of the
market. ‘Brands are expanding their offer-
ings, and we’ve followed suit by adapting and
restructuring the fair’s scheme,’ says Andreas
Gruchow, project director of Domotex.
To attract the attention of architects
and interior designers, Framing Trends –
a special area at the heart of Hall 9 – accom-
modated experimental areas and interactive
showcases based on the theme Unique You-
niverse. Curated by brand experience agency
Schmidhuber, Hall 9 stretched the boundaries
of the floor, up the walls and over the ceiling,
with a mix of design and art that turned
commercial flooring into a multisensory
experience. Divided into four zones, Fram-
ing Trends explored the potential of product
and service individualization and envisioned
how new technologies are taking us into a
more widely accessible, customizable and
expressive design-suffused experience. Why?
‘Domotex has to move from a product-
centred to a trendsetting fair that’s redefining
flooring,’ says Susanne Schmidhuber.
In the Living Spaces zone, interior
designers teamed up with companies and
brands to imagine the future of flooring. In
numerous ways, presentations demonstrated
how cutting-edge tech is already involv-
ing consumers in the development of new
products, sometimes even encouraging them
to ‘finish’ a product through its use. Here, a
gigantic kaleidoscope immersed visitors in a
mirrored space and invited them to rearrange
squares of coloured carpet, thus individual-
izing their surroundings.
The Flooring Spaces zone emphasized the
same ‘make it mine’ megatrend, presenting
floor coverings through the broader lens of
concepts currently driving interior design,
furnishing and art. Like an inhabitable M.C.
Escher drawing, German-American archi-
tect Sophie Green’s surreal trompe l’oeil
space for Belgian labels Limited Edition and
2tec2 responded to the current penchant
for cocooning, which makes strong interior
design crucial to our wellbeing. Inspired
by Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion,
Munich-based interior architect Konstantin
Landuris designed Future Loft for Classen;
the futuristic, holistic display comprised a
sleeping tube, a water feature and a vertical
garden. Flooring with a marble look and a
graphic pattern extended onto one wall. The
pattern is the result of digital printing, which
is allowing brands to offer more personal-
ized flooring designs, even in small batches.
‘Whereas before,’ says Classen’s Heinz-Dieter
Gras, ‘individualization was exclusive, in the
future it will become standard.’
The mainstream-spanning, forward-
looking concepts in the NuThinkers zone
were designed and produced by students
from a trio of German design schools. Mas-
ter’s students from the University of Applied
Sciences Mainz conceived VR software that
relies on body movement to design custom-
ized interiors in real-time, while Claude
Schmitt from the Saarland University of
Art and Design presented a self-operatingrobotic painter that can personalize a client’s
floors. Nele Ratjen, a student at the Hannover
University of Applied Sciences and Arts, con-
tributed a new type of floor-heating system
inspired by reptilian thermoregulation.
Visitors to the Art & Interaction zone
found flooring poised on the cusp of art
and design. With Bauhaus Revisited, artist
Hansjörg Schneider and creative direc-
tor Thomas Biswanger elaborated on the
designs of architectural icons like the Mas-
ters’ Houses in Dessau, employing a ‘highly
emotional’ upcycled material: Solid Textile
Board developed by Really. Their installation
appeared to be an architectural drawing,
but window cutouts pierced the drawing to
reveal a wall behind. Biswanger says that he
and Schneider ‘looked for fresh definitions
of how to experience the relation between
wall and floor. We treated the two in a non-
hierarchical way. They both serve as art, and
both are made from the same material. Art
on the walls makes the walls look light and
weightless, whereas art on the floor looks
strong and fragile at the same time. The floor
can be seen as a landscape. The message?
There is no limitation in finding new ways to
live with art and design.’
Like the Schneider-Biswanger alliance,
other collaborations at Domotex gave brands
an opportunity to view the flooring market
from new perspectives, while adding signifi-
cant depth to a well-grounded fair. ●
domotex.deFuture Loft – a design by Konstantin Landuris for Classen – featured a
sleeping tube with digitally printed flooring that covered the platform inside.DOMOTEX X FRAME 79