KBAC Flooring’s new Vanguard Collection luxury vinyl tile (LVT) range was selected as both floor and wall covering of the new Discovery Executive Wellness Centre in Sandton.
Dave Keefer, Business Development Manager of KBAC Flooring, says the company supplied and installed 300 square metres of the Vanguard Collection’s Plantation range’s Fever Tree wood colour for the walls of the Discovery Executive Wellness Centre, and 150 square metres of Plantation Fever Tree and Aged Teak wood colours for the floors.
“The flexibility of the Vanguard Collection tiles was an important factor in this installatiion and design. There are a lot of curved walls in the Wellness Centre and the LVTs’ capacity to shape itself around the walls was very important. The registered embossing of the tiles – which results in the texture following the grain of wood of each plank – is particularly dominant on the walls of the new Discovery facility.”
To comply with Discovery’s stringent health and hygiene requirements, KBAC Flooring for this installation used a special adhesive with low Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) as well as low odour and solvent content. “The adhesive has exceptionally strong bonding characteristics, and spreads like butter – a welcome feature when it came to the application of the Vanguard LVTs on the walls which earlier were primed with an additional adhesive to maximise bonding. KBAC Flooring has in the past installed LVTs on some feature walls but covering the walls of an entire premises is a very unusual and innovative design concept, specified in this case by Stacey-Lee Strydom, Discovery’s Group Facilities Space Planner,” Keefer explains.
The KBAC Flooring team had to cope with tight time restraints for the installation which took about a week followed by a few days of ‘touch up’ operations. “The walls required a different installation plan which posed a bit of a challenge but, more important, was the fact that the contact adhesive we used was totally unforgiving and allowed no room whatsoever for error adjustments during the laying process. Our team had one chance to install each plank because once it was applied, it produced a bonding as solid as concrete. The KBAC Flooring installation team also had to compete for working space as air-conditioning installation was still taking place when the LVTs were laid,” Keefer adds.
