CASE STUDY
Holiday Inn Express London Heathrow T4
Bespoke Carpet for a Busy Heathrow Gateway Hotel
At an airport hotel, flooring is put to work around the clock. Guests arrive at every hour with wheeled luggage, breakfast service begins at 5am, and the bar, restaurant and meeting spaces are rarely quiet. Carpet here has to look good on day one and keep looking good for years to come.
15,000m² of bespoke Axminster carpet
Holiday Inn Express London Heathrow T4 sits just a five-minute walk from Terminal 4 along a covered walkway. Working closely with the hotel’s interior design team over an 18-month programme of development and installation, Eaton Square Flooring produced approximately 15,000m² of carpet for the whole hotel. Bespoke Axminster was used in the bar, restaurant, corridors and meeting rooms, with tufted carpet throughout the guest bedrooms.
A Collaborative Approach
From the outset, the flooring was developed hand in hand with the interior design team. Rather than selecting from standard ranges, each carpet was shaped around the design vision for the hotel. Patterns, colours and constructions were refined through sampling and review until every area had the right balance of character and performance.
The 18-month programme covered everything from initial design development and colour matching through to manufacture and installation. Producing 15,000m² of carpet across two constructions meant careful coordination of production and delivery, so each area could be completed in step with the wider fit-out.
Tailored Axminster for the Bar and Restaurant
The bar and restaurant are the social heart of the hotel. Guests meet colleagues over coffee, unwind after a long flight or eat before an early departure. These spaces called for a carpet with real character, along with the resilience to cope with constant use.
Axminster was the natural choice. Woven using pre-dyed yarns, it holds clearly defined patterns and a lasting depth of colour, while its dense construction stands up to the demands of busy food and beverage areas. The design freedom of bespoke Axminster allowed the flooring to be developed around the hotel’s interior, rather than adapting the interior around a standard product.
Axminster Throughout the Corridors and Meeting Rooms
Around 5,000m² of Axminster was produced for the hotel’s corridors and meeting rooms. In an airport hotel, corridors are some of the hardest-working floors in hospitality. Guests, wheeled cases and housekeeping trolleys pass along them from early morning until late at night.
Woven Axminster retains its appearance under this level of traffic, and a well-considered pattern helps disguise everyday wear between cleans. Carrying the same construction into the meeting rooms gave the public areas a consistent standard of finish, from the lift lobby to the meeting table.
Tufted Carpet for the Guest Bedrooms
For the guest bedrooms, the priority shifted from footfall to comfort. Around 8,000m² of tufted carpet was produced, giving a soft and welcoming feel underfoot.
Rest matters at an airport hotel, where many guests are sleeping between long-haul flights or before an early start. The hotel already promotes its soundproofed rooms and noise-reducing headboards. Soft flooring plays its part too, absorbing footfall and helping to keep rooms calm and quiet. Tufted construction also made it practical to produce carpet at the scale required for hundreds of rooms, without compromising on quality.
Designed for a Busy Hotel
Every carpet was developed for its setting, balancing character, comfort and performance throughout the hotel.
Flooring at Scale for Hospitality
Holiday Inn Express London Heathrow T4 shows what close collaboration between flooring manufacturer and design team can achieve on a project of this size. Every carpet was developed for its setting, then produced and installed in step with a demanding hotel programme.
For Eaton Square Flooring, projects like this are about more than supplying carpet. They are about understanding how a hotel works and creating flooring that looks right on opening day and keeps performing long after.
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