In addition to looking good and tying into your décor, the flooring in your salon will need to withstand a lot of abuse. Each day that your salon is open for business, your floor could easily experience a hundred or more clients walking through from the changing room to the shampoo bowl and back to the stylist station before heading out the door. And that number does not include the stylists, assistants, and the drips of color that always manage to splatter along these same pathways. Needless to say, flooring is one of the many investments in your salon that you need to take seriously.
We’ve assembled some of the more popular types of flooring for you to consider for your workspace.
Cement
Many salons are opting to pull up old tile, wood flooring, even carpet from previous tenants and are going with the bare cement foundation below. It indeed can be one of the most cost-effective ways to refinish your floors and works well for a fun industrial edge. If you do go for cement flooring, be sure to fill in holes and sand down any significant bumps or obstructions, or people could easily trip or twist an ankle. Also, be sure to seal the flooring to avoid unwanted staining or wear patterns. Hard cement floors, whether raw cement or augmented with a stylized layer, can withstand the most abuse but are the toughest to stand on all day.
Stylists tend to spend most of their days standing behind the chair as they work on clients. After an eight-hour shift, feet will hurt. So, the suggestion is to either use cushion mats at each station or to consider a type of flooring that has a little “give” to it.
Ceramic Tile
According to Jim Boyd’s Flooring America, the two most common hair salon flooring options are tile flooring and hardwood flooring. Perfect for any heavy foot traffic location, ceramic tiles are highly durable, resistant to moisture, staining, and wear. They are also very easy to clean and maintain. If you go with this option, it’s suggested to go for ceramic tiles that have a PEI rating of 5.0. The PEI rating indicates the tile hardness. These ratings span from 1-5, with 5 being the strongest and most durable.
Wood Flooring
Wood floors offer a wonderful sense of warmth to most any environment. Many older buildings (think the 1930s or before) have solid wood flooring, which is very durable and can be refinished any multitude of times because of the thickness of the wood planks. Although you can get new solid wood flooring today, it is somewhat cost prohibitive. Today wood slatting usually sits atop a substrate, which means that you have a finite amount of thickness of real wood. That translates to a limited amount of times that you refurbish the surface. Also, depending on the substrate, wood flooring can add a slight cushioning over ceramic tiles or bare cement floor but need to have a good sealer over the top. Real wood is porous and tends to absorb all of the fun little drops of color, spilled coffee, and who knows what else. However, there are many wood laminates and wood patterned ceramic tiles that may provide a similar look but with less worry of damage.
Vinyl
The most economically sound flooring is VCT flooring or vinyl composition tile, which is a material used primarily in commercial and institutional applications. It’s frequently chosen for high-traffic areas because of its low cost, durability, and ease of maintenance. Vinyl flooring has high resilience to abrasion and impact damage and can repeatedly be refinished with chemical strippers and mechanical buffing equipment. Vinyl flooring is available in a variety of colors from several major flooring manufacturers. There are even options that closely resemble wood, stone, and concrete.
Bamboo
Recently bamboo flooring has become somewhat popular. According to Duro Design, strand bamboo flooring is harder and more dent-resistant than red oak. Created by fusing bamboo fibers under extreme pressure, this high-density flooring offers a sustainable and renewable option that is highly resistant to high traffic.
There are also options for solid bamboo flooring with either vertical on-edge (AKA edge grain) or horizontal strips laid flat (AKA flat grain). Both versions offer a beautiful finish but provide only a third of the hardness as strand bamboo flooring. These versions also dent and scratch much more easily.
Cork
More durable than hardwood flooring, cork flooring is both resilient and flexible. A renewable source, cork’s sound-dampening properties dramatically reduce the echo and impact noise. For salons, it’s best with several coats commercial-grade urethane, so it’s easy to clean.
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