If you’re in any way involved with contract flooring—be it as designer, buyer, PR person, or proprietor of any locale that requires such—it behooves you to drop by booth #2342 at Baltimore’s Convention Center during #NEOCONEAST on October 28 or 29, for that’s prime real estate to see Altro‘s latest line of ultra-durable, surprisingly colorful, and consummately safe floor and wall systems. Altro (also known as Altrofloor in the jolly old U.K.) has been manufacturing safe interior surfaces since 1919—that’s some 90-odd years of “creating safe and hygienic environments that are easy to clean and maintain.”

Altrofloor. Designed by Altro.

Altro must be a bit covetous of the “secret recipe” they use to build their floors and walls. For it took a good bit of digging through the info at altro.com before I unearthed the following gem: “Altro High Performance safety flooring is a unique combination of plasticized vinyl, aluminum oxide grains and silicon carbide grains with a glass fiber reinforcement. Some ranges also include quartz aggregates. A bacteriostat is incorporated in the flooring.” For veteran readers of 3rings, this means that the co-efficient of friction of Altro’s Floors surpasses even that of Glasswalk, let alone that of Nathan Allan Glass (though, to be fair, these two products, as you might have guessed, are made of glass and thus directed primarily towards decorative applications). Altro’s wares, to the contrary, are specifically manufactured for high-use environments where safety is paramount. We’re talking schools, hospitals, bars, restaurants, grocery stores—in short, any locale where concerns of safety and hygiene trump a purely aesthetic objective.

But neither should that imply that Altro’s floors and walls aren’t artful in their own right. The company offers an impressive variety of attractive designs, ranging from the classically-inclined “Ethos,” a facsimile of wood with choices that do a convincing impression of Antique Oak, Dark Cherry, and Honey Beech (among others); to the contemporary ContraX, an impermeable safety floor that infuses a Pointilist’s flair for pattern into a vibrant palette of blues, browns, grays, and reds. And lest we forget, Altro’s Whiterock Walls, a “grout-free, hygienic alternative to tiles,” comes in a pacifying array of pastels and shades of white, colors that—at certain times and certain places—achieve the desired effect of calming everybody’s nerves.