Special
Skirting boards and profiles with laminate, LVT, PVC, and vinyl inlay
VISIBLE WITHOUT BEING ON SHOW A MAJOR TREND IS THE QUEST FOR SKIRTING BOARDS WHICH ARE PART OF THE TOTAL INTERIOR IMAGE Pascal Thiel (Carl Prinz - D) Pascal Thiel has been a marketing manager with German skirtings specialist Carl Prinz for more than 15 years. Since a number of years, he notices how the market in inlay skirtings keeps on growing. “We started offering these inlay skirtings when design floorings became more and more prominent on the market, but especially the last 5 years this is quite booming and becoming more and more relevant. The portfolio is expanding and the end is nowhere near in sight yet. When you produce profiles, you depend on the flooring market. This means you accompany the market and design according to the trends.” “Profiles are normally not a design item. Customers are interested in discrete products that you don’t want to see. In general, you can say the emphasis is still on the floor, design skirtings with inlay slots help to create a general image. In it, you see only a very small amount of the aluminum.” “When we say the demand in inlay skirtings is growing, we are talking about something you don’t really want to see. There are two different approaches. One is that skirtings become visible with, e.g, led, the other is that the skirtings literally vanish from sight and where the skirting has the same design as the floor itself. 80% design of skirting is the same as the floor.” Art of being visible without being visible “I would like to add that we also have stairnoses that work the same way, with inlay in the front. You can put a strip of the flooring itself into the stair nosing, so the complete stairs are covered in design floors. Decades ago you had very heavy, visible stairnosing, but now the profile is taken to the background and the flooring is front and centre. The same goes for skirtings. You could state that inlay skirtings are all about the art of being visible without being visible, skirtings are not the main actor.” “I would like to conclude by expressing our hope to be able to meet our customers again. For the Dutch market, we would especially want to show a new version of our powdercoated black stair nosing during Domotex or a lot sooner, during a much smaller fair in October: Architect@ Work in Düsseldorf.”
How do you choose the right skirting board for every floor, wall, doorframe, or staircase? It’s no easy job, certainly on a market where the range of decorative and technical accessories is booming and the range is so wide that floor fitters almost have to build an extra storeroom for all the stock. In this context inlay skirting boards are the solution par excellence because you yourself decide whether the skirting board matches the floor completely or, on the contrary, there is a full or partial contrast. To cut a long story short, inlay skirting boards are primarily a purely technical solution because you separate the decorative and technical aspects from each other before you start on a job. With inlay skirting boards, you basically regard them solely as bearers, which you might
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or might not finish yourself with (in our case) an element found in the floor (or the staircase, the wall, or the door frame). You can do this, for instance, with an inlay in PVC. These skirting boards are obviously made available in various thicknesses so that they can be used for the diverse sorts of flexible floor covering or laminate or anything whatsoever.
Ready for fitting or you finish it yourself You have to draw a distinction in the range between two sorts of skirting board. On the one hand, there is the skirting board which leaves the factory ready for use and is supplied with the chosen inlay. And so, it is already fitted with the right strip or plank from the accompanying floor and is then finished in situ. It’s also possible to glue or clip it onto the bearer or a sort of Velcro can be fitted.
