Commercial Carpet and Carpet Tiles Derby

Commercial carpet takes a beating that a domestic carpet never sees: chair castors in the same square metre all day, wheeled trolleys, printer toner, coffee, and cleaning machines running over it every night. Specify a domestic-grade carpet into that and it will look tired within a year.

We supply and fit both carpet tiles and broadloom commercial carpet for offices, shops, schools, surgeries, community buildings and public areas, along with the floor preparation underneath and the transitions where the carpet meets a hard floor.

Carpet tiles are the default for most commercial floors now, and the reason is replaceability. Damage a tile and you lift that tile and drop in a spare, rather than patching a roll or re-carpeting the room. They generate far less waste on a cut-up floor plan, they can be laid in patterns or brand colours, and where there is a raised access floor they let you lift a panel to reach the services underneath.

Broadloom carpet still earns its place. It gives a continuous surface with no tile joints, it usually feels softer underfoot, and in a boardroom, hotel-style space or a room that will never be dug into it can look better for the money. It is harder to repair, which is the trade-off.

If you are weighing the two up, the question worth asking is how likely the floor is to be damaged in one spot, and how easily the business could stand a room being closed to re-carpet it.

What does the carpet class number mean?

It tells you the level of use the carpet is built for. Under the European standard EN 1307, carpets carry a use class: Class 31 for moderate commercial use, Class 32 for general commercial use and Class 33 for heavy commercial use such as main corridors and entrances. A general office is usually a 32, while a busy reception or circulation route is worth a 33. Paying for a 33 in a quiet meeting room is money that would be better spent on the corridor.

Does the carpet need to take castor chairs?

If people sit at desks on wheeled chairs, yes. Carpet intended for that use is tested against a castor chair test, and a product rated for continuous castor use will hold its pile where an untested one will flatten and fray in a ring around every desk. It is worth telling us at the quote stage which rooms have wheeled chairs, because it changes the specification in those rooms only.

Does the floor need to contrast with the walls?

In buildings used by the public it often should. Accessibility guidance, including BS 8300 and Approved Document M of the Building Regulations, looks for a visual contrast between surfaces such as the floor and the walls, measured as a difference in light reflectance value (LRV), so that people with limited vision can read the space. Manufacturers publish an LRV figure for each colour. We can tell you what a product's figure is, but whether your building needs to meet that guidance is a question for your access adviser or building control.

Floor coverings in commercial buildings carry a reaction to fire classification under BS EN 13501-1, written as a code such as Bfl-s1 or Cfl-s1. The letters describe how the covering behaves in a fire and how much smoke it produces. Approved Document B of the Building Regulations sets out what is expected in different parts of a building, and escape routes and protected corridors are held to a higher standard than an ordinary room.

Every commercial carpet and carpet tile we supply comes with a published classification, and we will tell you what it is before you commit. What we cannot do is decide what your building requires: that comes from your fire risk assessment, your building control officer or the specifier on the project. If you tell us the classification you need, we will work to it.

Carpet tiles are laid to a set-out, starting from a centre line rather than a wall, so the cut tiles at the edges are balanced and the pattern runs true. The laying pattern itself is a choice: quarter-turned tiles hide shading and are the safest option in a large floor, monolithic laying runs the pile all one way for a broadloom-like finish, and brick or ashlar laying gives a deliberate linear look. We will show you what each does to the room before we start.

Dye lots matter more than people expect. Tiles made in different production runs can differ very slightly in shade, which is invisible in the box and obvious on the floor. We order the whole job from one batch wherever possible, and where a floor has to be done in phases we tell you so the batch can be reserved.

Spare tiles are worth keeping. We leave you a box of attic stock from the same batch, so a tile ruined in two years' time can be replaced with one that matches rather than one that nearly matches. It is the single cheapest thing you can do to extend the life of a carpet tile floor.

Most commercial carpet jobs are a scheduling problem as much as a flooring one. Furniture has to move, the floor has to be clear, and the space has to be usable again by the time people arrive. We work evenings, weekends and closure days, and we can phase a floor room by room so a business keeps trading throughout.

Before anything goes down we check the subfloor is sound, flat and clean, because tiles laid over a dusty or uneven base lift at the corners. Where the base needs work we level and prepare it first, and where the carpet meets a hard floor we finish the junction with a proper threshold rather than a strip of tape.