Year’s best new products

The Innovations@DOMOTEX will give visitors a quick, concentrated overview of the year’s best and most exciting innovations and trends in flooring. It revolves around three special displays (the Innovations@DOMOTEX areas), where the 84 best innovations at DOMOTEX will be given artistic staging and extra prominence. The innovations themselves have been selected in the lead-up to DOMOTEX by an expert jury headed by the internationally renowned industrial designer Stefan Diez. The Innovations@DOMOTEX areas are as follows: Resilient and Textile Floor Coverings, Fibers and Yarns (Hall 6); Parquet and Laminate Flooring and Application and Installation Technology (Hall 9), and Modern Hand-Made Carpets (Hall 17).

The wide variety of innovations submitted for Innovations@DOMOTEX reveal a number of interesting trends. In luxury vinyl tiles and planks (LVT), for example, authentic-looking surface textures are very much in style, thanks to their deceptively close mimicry of the look and feel of the natural materials that inspired them. In the case of textile floor coverings, there is a marked trend towards high-end products, and the use of carpet tiles and planks is on the rise. In these areas and others, Innovations@DOMOTEX will unveil a number of totally new product types.

Meanwhile in the carpets and rugs segment, there is a trend toward high-quality products which are at once very rugged and still soft under foot. Warm, earthy tones are in, as are traditional ornamental motifs. Rugs, of course, go beautifully with hard flooring – an area where there is strong demand for solid-wood planks, not to mention multi-layer parquet and laminate products that combine natural wood with added color, textures and shapes for a wide variety of visual effects. Many of the latest parquet and laminate products feature innovative technologies and click-lock systems for quick and easy installation. Sustainably produced products are also a growing trend in this segment.

LVT tiles and planks will definitely be among the big attractions at the show, where they will feature more extensively than ever before. Yet another major visitor magnet will be the Wood Flooring Summit in Hall 9. Staged at DOMOTEX every two years, it will feature around 200 exhibitors from the parquet and laminate flooring industry.