Solon, Ohio—In partnership with designer Suzanne Tick, Tarkett has launched Light Shift, a modular carpet collection developed to celebrate communal spaces—specifically the way natural light can invite joy, wellness and a sense of family togetherness in them—as the world reexamines the meaning and use of physical space.
Drawing inspiration from scientific studies of light waves and frequencies, as well as man-made phenomena like light trails and reflections from architectural facades, the Light Shift collection interprets the profound ways light changes throughout the day to dramatically shape our experience of a space and influence interconnected beings, the company said.
“Light is the easiest point of entry to the senses,” said Tick. “As a little girl, I remember watching light reflect off of water during the day, and transition to the light of the moon and glistening of the stars at night. Light plays and displays all the time. It makes us aware that everything is a part of the unified.”
The collection includes three distinct carpet patterns, as well as a coordinating luxury vinyl tile:
Specular
The most structured of the modular collection, Specular borrows its imagery from mathematical grids but with a shifting, corrugated expression. Light and color emerge from behind the grid, creating a backlit effect, and break through it with subtle color moving across the surface, allowing the viewer’s perspective to change depending on the angle. This impression of movement, and the way the color seems to come through the grid like a reflection, inspired the idea of its mirror-like luminosity, the company said.
Light Shift
With its organic texture and saturated colors, Light Shift’s subtle, atmospheric pattern seems to absorb light in some places while bringing it to the surface in others, ultimately distributing glowing color equally across the modular pattern and creating the effect of planes of color, the company said. Light Shift’s fine-grain pattern is said to pair well with the more linear designs of the Specular and Parallel Ray patterns.
Parallel Ray
Parallel Ray explores the synergy of color and texture in a pattern of broken, parallel lines. The play of light between the dark and mid-tones creates contrast and a feeling of movement, while the scattered, broken lines create a larger textural pattern. The resulting rays of light, and their stop-and-start interaction with fields of color, evoke the shadows that occur in the Specular and Light Shift patterns.
Glint
This coordinating LVT expresses the color and pattern of light seen in the digital realm, relating the layered visual patterns seen in technological light conversions. The loosely overlapping, linear grids of dissolving rectangles, in both neutral and bright colors, display a change in kinetic energy though space to create a layered effect.