DOMOTEX 2016 set to open with biggest exhibitor lineup in years

• 1,441 exhibitors from 59 nations
• Innovations@DOMOTEX: spotlight on 84 selected creations
• Top international designers to speak at Innovations@DOMOTEX Dialogues

“More providers, more innovations, more inspiration – the scene is set for a successful DOMOTEX 2016,” commented Dr. Jochen Köckler, a member of the Managing Board at Deutsche Messe, the official organizer of DOMOTEX. “As the number one meeting place for the entire carpet and floor coverings industry, DOMOTEX will get the year off to a strong start with a shot of new ideas and business leads, and provide an excellent overview of all the new season’s trends and innovations.”

This year’s DOMOTEX features 12 halls with the world’s biggest display of carpets and floor coverings. Trade visitors from the flooring wholesale and retail sectors, architecture, interior design, the skilled flooring trades and the furniture and interior furnishing retail and wholesale sectors can expect a rich and diverse array of innovative materials, creative solutions and stunning designs spanning the entire floor covering spectrum, from carpets, parquet and laminate flooring right through to luxury vinyl tiles. “DOMOTEX is where trends are set and radiate across the marketplace. If you want a preview of the products and materials that will be on floors and in shops in the coming season, attending DOMOTEX is a must,” remarked Köckler.

Showcase for year’s best new products and developments

The Innovations@DOMOTEX showcase is one of the big highlights at DOMOTEX. It will give visitors a quick, concentrated overview of the year’s best and most exciting innovations and trends in flooring. It revolves around three special displays (the Innovations@DOMOTEX areas), where the 84 best innovations at DOMOTEX will be given artistic staging and extra prominence. The innovations themselves have been selected in the lead-up to DOMOTEX by an expert jury headed by the internationally renowned industrial designer Stefan Diez. The Innovations@DOMOTEX areas are as follows: Resilient and Textile Floor Coverings, Fibers and Yarns (Hall 6); Parquet and Laminate Flooring and Application and Installation Technology (Hall 9), and Modern Hand-Made Carpets (Hall 17).

The wide variety of innovations submitted for Innovations@DOMOTEX reveal a number of interesting trends. In luxury vinyl tiles and planks (LVT), for example, authentic-looking surface textures are very much in style, thanks to their deceptively close mimicry of the look and feel of the natural materials that inspired them. In the case of textile floor coverings, there is a marked trend towards high-end products, and the use of carpet tiles and planks is on the rise. In these areas and others, Innovations@DOMOTEX will unveil a number of totally new product types.

 

Meanwhile in the carpets and rugs segment, there is a trend toward high-quality products which are at once very rugged and still soft under foot. Warm, earthy tones are in, as are traditional ornamental motifs. Rugs, of course, go beautifully with hard flooring – an area where there is strong demand for solid-wood planks, not to mention multi-layer parquet and laminate products that combine natural wood with added color, textures and shapes for a wide variety of visual effects. Many of the latest parquet and laminate products feature innovative technologies and click-lock systems for quick and easy installation. Sustainably produced products are also a growing trend in this segment.  LVT tiles and planks will definitely be among the big attractions at the show, where they will feature more extensively than ever before. Yet another major visitor magnet will be the Wood Flooring Summit in Hall 9. Staged at DOMOTEX every two years, it will feature around 200 exhibitors from the parquet and laminate flooring industry.

Dialogue with leading lights of the international architecture scene

The Innovations@DOMOTEX areas will not only feature attractive exhibitors, but also provide the backdrop for a series of presentations and panel discussions (the Innovations@DOMOTEX Dialogues) in which renowned architects and designers will explore architectural trends and developments where floors and flooring play an important role. The speaker lineup includes star creatives from Lissoni Associati (Milan), Coop Himmelb(l)au (Vienna), Alexander Brenner Architects (Stuttgart), BBP - Blocher Blocher Partners (Stuttgart), Bogevischs Buero Architekten & Stadtplaner (Munich), Kinzo (Berlin), D’art Design Gruppe (Neuss), and JOI Design (Hamburg). The presentations and panel talks will focus on design for hotels, restaurants, offices, healthcare facilities, shops and residential settings.

Each Dialogue session will be followed by tours tailored to the subjects covered in that session. The tour program is aimed primarily at creatives from the architecture, interior architecture and interior design scenes who are at DOMOTEX scouting for new ideas on floor covering applications. The Innovations@DOMOTEX format also includes Guided Tours of selected exhibits, led by big-name architects and designers. The Guided Tours will run twice daily. Full details of the Innovations@DOMOTEX showcase can be found in the Innovations@DOMOTEX Guide, which can be downloaded from Innovations@DOMOTEX area in Hall 6.

DOMOTEX 2016 also has plenty to offer beyond the Innovations@DOMOTEX showcase. Lovers of classic Oriental rugs, for example, will find plenty to amaze and inspire them in halls 15 and 16. Further along the classic spectrum, Hall 14 will house a special display for antique carpets. Halls 2 to 4 are home to an extensive selection of machine-woven carpets and rugs, while halls 5 and 6 are where visitors will find resilient floor coverings and the show’s lineup of textile floor coverings for the residential and commercial sectors. Next door in Hall 7, there’s the “Treffpunkt Handwerk” skilled trades hub with its extensive exhibits and presentations for the benefit of parquet installers, floor layers, interior furnishers and painters. And last, but by no means least, visitors can go to halls 8 and 9 to learn all about the latest trends and innovations in solid wood parquet and laminate flooring and outdoor floor coverings.

DOMOTEX Worldwide:

DOMOTEX asia/CHINAFLOOR: Shanghai, 22 to 24 March 2016 – the largest international flooring-trade exhibition in the Asia-Pacific region.

 

DOMOTEX Turkey: Gaziantep, 23 to 26 May 2016 – Turkey’s leading trade fair for carpets and floor coverings.