Specialising in wooden flooring, facades
Satinder Chawla, managing director of Span Floors speaks on why wood isn’t always considered ideal as a surface and how his company is striving to correct this misconception.
With more than two decades under their belt, Span Floors is a company which, in the words of its managing director, Satinder Chawla works in the wood flooring and facade business and caters to luxury residential and specialised hospitality projects—wherever there is need for top quality products and unique specifications.
“There are many different manufacturers across the world producing good products, but the number one differentiator is the quality of installation. It’s very easy to get the products but to get it installed correctly to the specification is something very few people have been able to do, particularly in the wood flooring sector,” Chawla said speaking exclusively to ET HospitalityWorld.
India is a relatively new market when it came to wood flooring compared to tile or marble. These have developed a lot of infrastructure, trained people to a large extent. Wood flooring on the other hand is a new subject and in-depth product knowledge is still lacking and errors when it comes to installation continue to happen—this is where his company is stepping in, he added.
The gap that Chawla saw in the Indian market—even in the five-star was poor execution. He gave the example of poolside decking where he felt in multiple instances the choice of material was poor and it was also installed poorly.
“The value that we add is to help our clients — the hotel owners, the purchase department, the specifications in-charge, the architects, the PMCS. We can tell them why they should choose a particular material and once the specifications are frozen, we can help them with the purchasing and then most importantly tell them what the correct way is to install the product,” he said about how his company was a differentiator.
Wood floors, whether indoors or outdoors in Indian five-star hotels, were far from world class, he said, adding that his company had worked a lot in this area to identify why things work abroad but not in India, when it comes to and surfaces. People had been saying that wood was not meant for India and that is something that Chawla strongly disagreed with, it is just a question of correct installation and purchasing the correct product, he stressed.
“As a hotel owner, what you want is a durable floor. As a maintenance person, you want the floor to be easy to upkeep, and that teams do not have to be specifically trained in complex procedures, we have a new category called water resistant laminate flooring that is very suitable for mass market products also. And then as you go into the luxury segment, you get into the high-quality engineered wood floors—so there are products across the price spectrum, and depending on what the client budgets are, a suitable product can be chosen,” he said about what he could offer clients in the hospitality sector.
