Keep your feet on the ground: Frescolori

When it comes to floors and walls, architects and interior designers are obviously aware of how their decisions can fundamentally impact the overall atmosphere of a room. For both applications, it is important to make the right choice for the respective location with sensitivity and flair for materials, colours and textures. Such large surfaces can quickly become very dominant – and some things are not so easy to undo.

But a successful wall and floor design can give definition to an architectural space, forging a unique character and identity. Take the Moxy Hamburg City Hotel, for example. Here, local studio Joi Design has created an interior with its own particular charm, demonstrating a great deal of feeling for the young hotel chain – and for the Hanseatic city. Can the floor of a hotel lobby make you want to explore a city? When creative ideas are implemented in unexpected ways, the answer is yes, it can. Like a zoomed-in city map or diagram, lines, place names and short texts, yellow on grey, draw the guest’s attention to special locations and sights, transforming the floor itself into something instantly eye-catching.

Joi Design relied on Bocholt-based Frescolori for the implementation of this design, or more precisely the company’s Maranzo seamless floor product. Characterised by a special material hardness that can withstand heavy daily footfall in highly frequented, commercial areas, Marnazo is also resistant to the adverse effects of heat and moisture. In addition to these functional properties, architects and designers particularly appreciate the customisation potential and creative freedom offered by its ability to be pigmented. Barbara Wiethoff, Senior Interior Designer at Joi, played a lead role in the design of the Hamburg hotel. She comments on the decision to go with Maranzo: ‘On the one hand, the material of the floor should reflect the typical industrial chic of the Moxy brand, and on the other, it needed to express our idea of a colourful city tour on the floor.’

When dealing with spatial aesthetics, it’s clear that nuance matters. It was important for Wiethoff to strike a very specific tone with Maranzo: ‘The advantage was that the colour scheme could be fine-tuned to our exact specifications. Our client, and we too, had a precise idea of the desired look and we were able to achieve this through a step-by-step process of developing various detailed samples.’

It is perhaps not surprising that Maranzo has just been awarded the prestigious ‘Plus X Award’ as ‘Best Product of the Year’. If you visit the Frescolori website, you’ll see comprehensive documentation of the company’s product range. And it is impressively expansive – offering solutions for a wide range of applications on walls and floors.

‘Caramor’, a lime marble plaster that forms the basis of all Frescolori surface finishes, is the heart of the programme. It consists of over 96 per cent natural substances and supports a healthy indoor climate. Enabling walls to ‘breathe’, it absorbs moisture and releases it back again in a regulated manner. In addition, the plaster is consistently coloured all the way through, allowing soiling to be easily removed with a sanding pad. Furthermore, with up to 400 possible structure forms to choose from as well as 100,000 colours, Caramor offers designers and architects a wealth of design options – and it’s worth finding out more about the specific properties of the materials and the possibilities it enables.

Frescolori’s considerable expertise in matters of wall and floor design did not come about by chance, but has accrued over nearly three decades. In 1993, Frank Ewering, a third-generation master painter, went into business for himself and developed a secret formula for his own base material, from which further products and surfaces later developed. At the end of a four-day production process, the alchemy begins: heat is generated and the substances combine to form a unique putty-like compound.

Ewering was able to turn his many years of experience and his sensitivity for raw materials into a business. Five years later, in 1998, the Frescolori brand was registered and quickly gained industry recognition. Involvement in numerous renowned projects for various corporations, hotels and even cruise ships has today only cemented the company’s reputation.

The company only sells its products to those who have first completed a special training course, and the quality of workmanship on subsequent projects can also be digitally monitored and documented.

All this may make you want to pay a visit to Frescolori in Bocholt, and to their showroom there where products are presented in detail. After all, seeing real-life examples at close quarters is how the individual properties, textures and nuances of a product are truly revealed – of key importance, of course, to the work of architects, planners and designers.

Photos © Christian Kretschmar for JOI-Design

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