Manufacturer Shaw Contract had an impressive showing at NeoCon last week with wins in two categories: Modular Carpet (Haven, Gold) and Hard-Surface Flooring (Natural Choreography, Silver).


But for my money, as well as my sense of tactile engagement and whimsy, the real show-stopper was Inside Shapes.

Produced in collaboration with Stockholm studio Form Us With Love, Inside Shapes is comprised of four different units that amount to seven different shapes, proposing a versatile, colorful, and engaging approach to modular carpet that's also an exploration into the aesthetic possibilities of basic geometry.

The "four shapes" remind me foremost of Shel Silverstein's The Missing Piece, that well-known childhood parable about identity and belonging. One of the four tiles is a basic square, but the other three are a matching convex and concave curve, triangle and triangular cutout (the "point"), and a pair of matching triangles.

The shapes can be combined in various ways within an enhanced spectrum of available colors-12 to be exact, each grounded in organic shades found in nature with accompanying light and dark variations.

For those who might be intimidated by the breadth and expanse of aesthetic possibility here, Shaw Contract offers 17 Premixes: "Warm to cool, curvy to angular, sophisticated to dynamic."

For everyone else, Inside Shapes grants "Permission to Play." Herein find a rolling canvas of possibility: "From offices to schools, retail to hospitality, architects and designers can engage and enliven the human experience in commercial spaces."

Find out more at Shaw Contract and Form Us With Love.