Natural Stone

 Slate is quickly becoming one of the most popular materials for hotel flooring. This is because slate has a variety of properties that makes it a perfect option for this application.

STRENGTH

Stone has a reputation for being hard. However, some stones really aren’t all that strong, and can suffer from cracks, crumbling and breakage. One example of a relatively soft stone is marble.

On the other hand, slate is one of the most durable and resilient natural stone materials that you can get. It is resistant to cracking, to wearing down, and to crumbling, and it works great in high traffic areas, such as in hotel lobbies and hallways.

One thing you have to remember when choosing a flooring material for a hotel, is the tip of the heal effect. If a woman is wearing high heals, the direct force that is being put on the floor at the very bottom tip of her heal is equal to the amount of force that is distributed to a floor by an elephants entire body. Considering how many women are going to be clicking their heals up and down the hotels hobby, it behooves a clever designer to use a material, such as slate, that can handle the load.

Slippage

The world is a litigious place, and no where more so than the united states. Even worse, establishments that are perceived as having “big pockets”, such as hotels, are often targets for people looking to make a quick buck suing. Considering this, it is important that you do everything in your power to reduce the risk of injury to your guests. This includes reducing the chance of slippage on your floors and hallways.

Naturally clefted slate is a great solution for this problem. A natural cleft refers to the dimensional quality of the surface of the stone. When material is clefted it is dimensional, and often resembles the kind of stone found in mountains and in nature.

The amount of clefting depends on the source of the slate, but it can range from very broken and rigid peaks, to a smooth honed surface with just a little texture.

When you use clefted slate, you reduce the risk of slippage, because the tiny peaks and rises, the overall texture of the stone, serves to act as traction for a persons feat. Even if the stone gets wet for whatever reason, it will still give visitors a little bit of traction.

This minor detail can save the life of a hotel, and prevent ruin from a careless spill.

STAINS

Hotels flooring gets used, which means that it gets dirty. Whether its from mud coming off of a guests feat, or a spill from room service, or just normal dust and dirt from time itself, you know that the floor will occassionally get messy.

Now you could have maids sweeping the halls constantly, teams of them scouring the lobbys for any sign of dirt or dissarray. However that is very expensive, and probably ineffective. An easier solution is provided by certain types of multicolored slate.

Multicolored slate refers to material that has a variety of colors in it. These colors form naturally during the development of the stone, and tend to create unique patterns and formations, which amke every individual tile look different.

When multicolored slate is used in flooring, the powerful colors tend to hide dirt, with messes dissapearing within the complexities of the pattern of the stone itself. This means that your floors will almost always look clean, even if the maids go on strike.

Even if you choose a solid colored slate, the material tends to be resistant to stains and damage. While slate does have tiny pores into which corrosive and staining liquids can penetrate, it is relatively simple to apply a chemical sealer to the stone during installation. This sealer will clog the pores of the stone, making them basically impervious to penetration.

Slate also doesn’t have the chemical acid problem that many other types of stone, such as marble and travertine, suffer from.

STYLE

One of the nice features of slate is that it comes in sucha  wide variety of styles, colors and finishes. There are well over 100 different colors and multicolors of slate, and different lots of stone will vary slightly by color. This is because when you quarry stone from a mountain, the stone that comes from the same part of the mountain will tend to look the same. However when you quarry all of the stone in an area, and you have to go deeper, the colors in the stone can vary slightly, forming new but derivitive patterns. This means that there is a virtually endless array of slate colors which you can use.

Slate also comes in a variety of finishes. Naturally slate is clefted, with a rough, bumpy, dimensional surface that resembles raw stone from the wild. This is the finish which provides the most slip resistance.

However slate can be grinded down by machine powered grinders, to have a smooth flat surface, that is called a honed finish. The nice thing about honed slate is that while it has the finished, perfect look of a flat and level installation, the material still retains some texture, which makes it fairly slip resistant.

If the grinding process is taken to the next level, it is actually possible to polish certain slates, to the point where they actually shine the way marble does. Unfortunately this process causes the stone to lose its slip resistance, and much of its vibrant color. It also makes it susceptible to scratches.

CONCLUSION

There is a reason that you are seeing slate in more and more hotel lobbies these days. It is easy to maintain, easy to protect, and it tends to take care of itself, and your guests. Aside from all of that though, there is a philisophical power that this material exerts, that tends to evoke a sense of comfort, nature, and peace. This design effectadds stylish elegance to a material which is already utilitarian and functional.