Cork Flooring: A Designer's Sustainable Choice
Article source: Architectureau.com
Since joining Breathe in 2019, Ali Whelan has worked across multi-residential, commercial and hospitality projects, with her dedication to sustainability underpinning every aspect of her work. Ali has championed Australian-made products like SaveBOARD, Durra Panel, ECOPact, and Brickworks’ carbon-neutral bricks. Today she shares a more traditional product she continues to specify for its sustainable attributes and design flexibility.
Cork flooring featured in Breathe’s Park Street project.
Image: Tom Ross
What’s your favourite architectural product right now, and what do you love about it?
We’re loving using cork at the moment, particularly for flooring. Cork is a carbon sequester, a renewable resource and it’s recyclable and biodegradable so it’s a totally circular material. It also has a similar warmth and aesthetic to timber flooring with the added benefit of it’s inherent acoustic properties.
If you had to describe cork in just three words, what would they be?
Natural, circular, durable.
Can you talk us through how you’ve used the material in a recent project?
We have used cork as a flooring material in a range of project typologies now and are loving the versatility of it. We have used pre–finished floating cork flooring in new apartments at Nightingale Preston as well as adaptive re-use apartments at Park Street. We have also just installed cork flooring in our new office fit-out, which has a central focus on circularity.
Breathe’s Nightingale Preston Teilhaus.
Image: Derek Swalwell
What feedback have you received from clients?
They’re loving it. It’s beautiful and has the warmth of timber flooring but is softer under foot and is very good for softening the acoustics of a space. They’re also really liking the natural, textured surface with a range of finishes and styles.
Do you have any tips for other designers looking to specify cork?
Choose the right product for the application and the life of the project, there are so many forms of cork flooring, each with their own strength. Talk with your builder and your client about the specific install and cleaning requirements of cork. Cork is known to be incredibly durable when installed and maintained correctly.
What’s an architectural product you’re keen to experiment with that you haven’t used previously?
I’m really interested in exploring material applications of hemp composites. Hexcore are really pushing the boundaries with their innovative hemp composites which have the potential to be used as joinery board, insulation blankets, wall or floor lining and as an alternative to engineered timber. Hemp is a green crop, planted in between harvests to restore soil biology so it is exciting to see a potential use for the material in construction as part of a broader ecology.
