The annual Best of NeoCon awards, presented by Contract magazine, highlight innovative products within the commercial design sector. NeoCon50 had approximately 376 entries in its 41 product categories, including Broadloom and Modular Carpet, Carpet Fiber, and Hard-Surface and Healthcare Flooring. Forty-Four jurors worked in teams, reviewing and evaluating the products digitally before they arrived at the NeoCon showrooms to receive presentations by product manufacturers. They then voted to determine Gold or Silver Awards in each category, and consider products for Innovation Awards. Of the 85 awarded products, 10 were floor coverings. Here are the winning products in the flooring industry.

Carpet Broadloom
Gold Award: Velvet Fringe Series (Tarkett/Tandus Centiva)
Tarkett’s Woven Fringe collection is the result of a happy accident. During early production trials, the design team pushed the loom wire mechanism to its limits, causing the wire repositioning to misfire and creating a line of long, uncut face fiber--or fringe--across the eft. This effect mirrored the fringe selvedged edge that a velvet weaving loom produces and became the inspiration. After multiple trials, the team has discovered a way to safely recreate the fringe effect in a consistent manner, paving the way for Velvet Fringe broadloom.

Silver Award: The Drawing Room Collection (Bentley)
Once structured, stiff, and staid, office environments are now places to gather, share ideas, collaborate and create, think, and inspire. And while workplace design has shifted to embody more relaxed, residential aesthetics, something is still missing. Workspaces of the future must be as invigorating and empowering as they are calming and comforting. It’s a balance; tailored yet trendy, bold yet vibrant. With its newest carpet collection, Bentley strikes that balance, and brings a new edgy energy to designers’ libraries with The Drawing Room collection.

Carpet Modular
Gold Award: Haven (Shaw Contract)
Traditional wisdom tells us there’s no place like home. But what if home was not simply a place, but a state of mind? The Haven collection reimagines home as a mood, an idea, the quality of comfort and familiarity that feeds our instinctual desire to feel grounded in the world. This collection of modular carpet tiles is designed to add the comforts and familiarity of a residential space to the contract market, drawing inspiration from the qualities we associate with home: comfort, well-being, warmth, softness and a profound sense of place.

Silver Award: Dichroic (Patcraft)
Featuring a sweeping color gradation that creates a compelling ombre effect, Dichroic combines shape and color for multiple design options that support color blocking and zoning spaces within commercial interiors. Constructed with up to 35% recycled post-consumer PET fiber, it is offered in both facet and 24x24 in. carpet tiles, with rich color ways that encourage optical design to help create warmer, optimistic spaces.

Editor’s Choice Award: Textured Sky (Milliken)
Textured Sky, a new collection blending vibrancy with visual intrigue, offers an infinite amount of design combinations, making a truly customizable environment a reality. With a selection of three distinctive SDN patterns and 20 organic colors, Textured Sky’s interior influence can be powerful or understated with unique variation found in each color, creating one-of-a-kind floorscapes. Meticulously woven throughout each tile, its high-luster yarn by Universal Fibers showcases a reflective, almost-glistening finish. Accentuating the Textured Sky collection as a whole, this yarn promises a refined and uniquely incandescent aesthetic.

Hard-Surface Flooring
Gold Award: Pentagonals (Tarkett/Johnsonite)
Pentagonals Cradle-to-Cradle certified rubber flooring was inspired by geometric tangram puzzles, where shapes fill a surface without overlapping or leaving gaps. Of the 15 pentagons that can fit a tangram puzzle, Tarkett has selected three for the Pentagonals collection: Shell creates a random or linear pattern; the stately shape of Monument creates direction and a sense of movement; and Diamond echos the cut of its precious stone namesake.

Silver Award: Natural Choreography (Shaw Contract)
Natural Choreography is a collaboration with renowned global architecture and design firm, the Rockwell Group. The collection brings accessibility of the high-end, luxe visuals of end-cut block wood and marble shear slabs to mass commercial design through the affordability and ease of maintenance of luxury vinyl tile. Cut, an end-cut block wood visual, offers a dramatic composition in its concentric end-cut wood visual with an unexpected added layer of luxe with a champagne and nickel silver metallic inlay. Shear, a marble shear, offers an organic marbled visual in four luxe color finishes, ranging from a light carrara marble to a deep onyx color finish.

Healthcare Flooring
Gold Award: Garden Walk (Tarkett/Tandus Centiva)
Based on the evolving needs of generations, the Garden Walk Collection features smaller, more contemporary patterns and soft, neutral palettes inspired by natural elements. Featuring ColorPoint Broadloom, and Powerbond and modular tile, Garden Walk is available in 12 patterns and colorways that invoke a fresh, high-end spa-like environment.

Innovation Award: Healthy Environments (Mohawk Group)
Mohawk Group believes healthy environments nurture the positive connections that allow patients and care providers to thrive, and are committed to innovating flooring solutions for optimum health and wellness. The company’s healthcare segment specialists and creative team integrate design, research and development, technology and sustainability to foster high-performance spaces that empower the human mind, body and spirit. The Healthy Environments collection is inspired by the soothing colors and textures of species native to the Southwest desert. In addition to their natural beauty, the innate hardiness of these plants provides a paradigm for perseverance through difficult challenges and environments. Drawing inspiration from these plants and biophilic design, the Healthy Environments collection was created to advance healing and productivity in healthcare interiors. The collection consists of two product categories: heterogeneous sheet patterns inspired by biophilic design and three coordinating carpet plank patterns.

Carpet Fiber
Gold Award: Heathered Hues (Mohawk Group)
Heathered Hues is Mohawk Group’s new high-performance color yarn system available in both Duracolor and Colorstrand technologies. This highly sustainable, solution-dyed nylon fiber creates high styling and vivid color for all market segments, projects and budgets. Heathered Hues fiber is textured and blended in a desirable palette of warm and cool neutrals with vibrant color accents. The heathered yarns provide visual texture and dimension when tufted, allowing for a variegated, realistic wool-like appearance for warmth and sophistication in contract interiors. Designed to do more with less, the yarn is dematerialized for a low environmental impact, and no water is used in its production. Finer Heathered Hues yarns are used for high performance at lower weights and Mohawk Group’s direct tuft technology minimizes energy and carbon dioxide impact while also making the fiber easy to recycle.

For more information, visit bestofneoconawards.com.