Project data
Value: £500,000
Client: Domus Tiles
Mailen Design and Kingspan
Products: Knauf GIFAfloor
Project details
When Domus – the UK’s leading supplier of tiles to developers and architectural specifiers–fitted out its 6,500ft2 flagship showroom in London’s Clerkenwell, it specified GIFAfloor from Knauf.
“The flooring is crucial to displaying our products at their best and GIFA is ideal because it provides an extremely solid and stable floor,” says Peter Dawson, Domus’ Technical Director. “It is an excellent substrate for the very large porcelain tiles that we are using.”
The ground floor display areas and extensive sample library are innovative, interactive but importantly adaptive. Interestingly, by using elevating movable display units with no fixed zones the space can be altered to create surprise and intrigue.
GIFAfloor enabled Domus to deal with the heavy display cabinets as its material library contains more than 10,000 porcelain, ceramic, glass, mosaic, and stone sample pieces. These cabinets weigh up to 2.5 tonnes each and might have caused the large porcelain tiles to crack but a double layer of GIFAfloor dealt with this potential issue.
The GIFAfloor system is a partial-access raised floor system providing the ability to run services under the floor with ease. It is manufactured from natural gypsum based calcium sulphate and is ideal for raised floor areas requiring continuous finishes such as sheet vinyl or hard finishes such as stone and large format porcelain. In addition, the GIFAfloor is an excellent screed replacement, removing a wet trade from site and saves time in the construction programme.
Peter Dawson added, “This floor system provides an utterly solid, very flat, unmovable base with a high quality feel under foot. It was so much quicker and convenient to install. We were able to get in and install our furniture and displays so much earlier.”
The 1200 x 600mm panels are installed on grid of pedestals creating a robust monolithic floor structure, the void beneath can be accessed via GIFAfloor access panels and frames. GIFAfloor panels are engineered with a tongue and groove edge profile that once installed produces a flat, smooth and extremely dimensionally stable floor that’s suitable for direct application of the floor finish. So there is no necessity of additional plywood layers or additional fixings as there is with traditional raised access flooring installations.