Material Futures

What choices lie ahead regarding the materials we use? To answer that question, ELLE Decoration has partnered with Tarkett to create a special edition magazine that takes an exciting deep dive into the materials that are shaping the world of tomorrow. Material Futures is a story of sustainability, circularity, and regeneration. These are the pillars that the next generation will be built on and what comes next is truly exciting, as we move beyond what is known and find that there is still so much to discover.

As a leader in flooring, Tarkett is committed to support industry in the transition towards circularity and to engage with end-users to facilitate a change in behavior. That’s why we decided to do this collaboration with ELLE Decoration and hope this magazine will bring inspiration, trigger conversation and eventually lead to sustainable change.

Global companies with an international presence and substantial footprints have the greatest potential for impact and the resources to invest in material innovation – this is one reason why futures research agency FranklinTill seeks to work with some of the world’s largest manufacturers, including Tarkett. 

Designers work within a complex series of limitations. That’s not the case with Tarkett, where material innovation and circularity are embedded at the core of everything the company does. The Beauty of Circularity strategy was developed by FranklinTill for Tarkett to communicate the depths of Desso carpet tiles' circularity story.

Patricia Urquiola is known for incorporating sustainability into her design practice and pushing brands to be greener. According to Urquiola, we should consider the entire life cycle and the broader societal effects of the new materials and objects we put out there. 

Earlier this year, Patricia Urquiola launched a carpet tile collection with Tarkett. Apart from our shared vision to make a collection with a closed-loop system and the lowest possible environmental impact, she wanted to avoid the organic lines so prevalent in current interior design projects. Instead, she looked to the grid structure of woven textiles like tweed and bouclé for inspiration and incorporated this into a tufted carpet tile.

Back in 2014, we started thinking of a way to re-use Tarkett’s leftover Desso rugs, for instance, items from previous collections or pieces containing small imperfections. That’s when we started experimenting with adding a splash of colour to these textiles - van Keijsteren. The duo knew from the start that the colour red should be their starting point. 

In 2022, this was extended to Tarkett’s carpet tile collection. Working together with Tarkett’s team, RENS elevated their dying technique to an industrial scale. We decided to use the red dye on only half of the tile, so the previous hues and nuances work together with the new colour. The result shows the beauty of imperfection.

The duo underlines the importance of durable collaborations between designers and manufacturers, like the one they have with Tarkett.