Designing with Life Floor's Tile Shapes

Did you know that Life Floor comes in four standard shapes? Our tiles were originally manufactured as 24” square tiles, but rectangles, triangles, and hexagons have been developed over the years. With these shapes, our Studio Team and partnering design firms have been able to imagine an endless range of possibilities for aquatic facilities around the world. Through countless different configurations and color combinations, our tiles enable opportunities to create beautiful environments with unparalleled safety benefits. Explore the design options available with our standard shape offerings below!

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Squares 

Our square tiles can be arranged in randomized multi-color fields to evoke environmental elements like sand and water. They can also be configured in colorful gradient patterns using a range of tones from our palette. For a more classic design, squares look beautiful when arranged in a checkerboard grid. For a more modern effect, square tiles of the same color can be installed consecutively to form long, rectangular configurations. Some facilities have even opted for a staggered zig-zag pattern. To add even more visual interest, customers often request thematic inlays that fit within a single tile. While the original shape of our tiles may be simple, it is filled with the potential to create both beautiful and cost-effective design solutions!

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Triangles 

Simply by cutting our square tiles diagonally to form right triangles, we’ve created an array of new design opportunities. These tiles have been the most popular choice when creating gradient effects, especially when mimicking coastlines. They’re also an excellent choice for adding accents of color around a facility. For a more geometric approach, mirrored triangles can be arranged to create an even larger pattern. Images like pine trees can even be created in a surface design by combining triangles with our rectangle and square tiles!

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Rectangles 

Our rectangular tiles present the opportunity to design with a popular 1’ x 2’ grid or to create long plank effects by aligning tiles of the same color in a row. They enable designers to create more modern, geometric patterns. Similar to our other shapes, rectangles can be arranged in gradients or they can be used to break up solid fields of color with bright accents. Due to their size, rectangles are a popular choice in smaller spaces like locker rooms. Try varying the rotation of these tiles to achieve a dynamic look. 

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Hexagons 

In 2019, we unveiled the newest addition to our shape collection: the hexagon. Our Studio Team loves how this playful, geometric shape transports visitors to colorful landscapes with intricate and delightful patterning. Our hexagon tiles add immediate visual complexity to any space, without the need for additional design work or custom cutting. They can be used in more natural designs to mimic the look of a sparkling body of water or a varied landscape of grass, dirt, and rocks. Hexagons also lend themselves to radial designs and are perfect for splash pads.

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While these shapes encompass our standard options, Life Floor tiles can also be cut into virtually anything! We commonly install curved designs, logos, custom shapes, and inlays. Is there a new standard shape you’d like to see us offer? Let us know in the comments section below!  

National Park and Recreation Month: Featured Installations

Happy National Park and Recreation Month! We’d like to extend a huge thank you to our clients working in Parks and Recreation departments for your continued work on making our communities beautiful, fun, and safe. To celebrate, we’re featuring four municipal aquatic facilities where we’ve installed Life Floor across the country. If you happen to live nearby one of these, be sure to visit when you can!

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Tropics Indoor Waterpark + Bamboo Bay - Shoreview Community Center, Shoreview, MN

The city of Shoreview renovated the existing Indoor Tropics Waterpark pool deck in late 2018. They chose Life Floor in sandy shades and a natural Slate texture to reflect the tropical beachside theme of the park. Guests and staff immediately recognized the additional comfort and safety Life Floor provided. Shortly after, the city moved forward with the decision to add Life Floor to the locker rooms. “Adding Life Floor to the locker rooms was something a lot of people noticed right away: ‘Oh great, you got rid of the slippery floor!’” Buck noted once Life Floor had been installed.

The build-out for Bamboo Bay, the multi-level spray structure expansion, was completed a few months after in early 2019. The city again chose Life Floor to cover the entire surrounding deck of the structure and the nearby locker rooms. 

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Pleasant Glade Pool Deck and Parr Park Splash Pad - Grapevine, TX

“We have really enjoyed Life Floor. It has definitely made our deck that used to be so hot much better to walk on. It’s great.”

— Hunter Hardeman, Aquatic Supervisor of Grapevine

The City of Grapevine, TX provides an impressive aquatic program to the surrounding community with both indoor and outdoor facilities to play, exercise, and compete. With an average summer temperature of 96 degrees, the city experiences extremely hot concrete decks that can hit 140 degrees in the afternoon. Grapevine chose Life Floor because of the tile’s unique ability to dissipate heat underfoot. Unlike concrete, Life Floor tiles do not absorb heat, which is why the tiles feel comfortable to walk on in the summer sun. The city also installed Life Floor in the locker room areas to help reduce slip and fall injuries.

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Trailhead Park Splash Pad - Winter Haven, FL

The City of Winter Haven, FL built the splash pad at Trailhead Park in 2016. The city opened it originally with a concrete finish for the surface and they’ve resurfaced it about 3-4 times with different products. After experiencing some slip and fall incidents, they tried a rubberized paint with a sand-like substrate in it; however, injuries were still problematic. The committee at Winter Haven ultimately opted for Life Floor, pleased with the fact that Life Floor met all of the requirements they needed to solve while also being certified to NSF/ANSI Standard 50.

“Not only does it look awesome but it meets many criteria of fall and slip resistance and we’ve gotten nothing but great feedback from the product and that we did something to address our slip and fall issues.”

— Andy Palmer, City of Winter Haven Parks Planning and Strategic Initiatives Manager

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Westfield Memorial Pool Complex - Westfield, NJ

“We haven’t had a single major incident of people getting hurt on Life Floor, and it’s worth the peace of mind that the kids are safe.”

— Heather Re, Aquatics Supervisor Westfield Memorial Pool

After 5 years of enjoying Life Floor, Westfield Memorial Pool decided to redesign their splash pad to create a centerpiece attraction at their aquatic facility. The city’s main objectives were to refresh the space as a way to drive membership sign-ups and to create a beautiful environment where families could share memories on social media. By collaborating with the Life Floor Studio team, the Westfield splash pad now features a vibrant, unique octopus design that guides kids through and around splash features adjacent to the facility’s zero-depth leisure pool. 

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Interested in adding Life Floor’s safety surfacing to an aquatic facility at your park? Feel free to contact us!

City of Winter Haven Reopens Splash Pad with Improved Safety Surfacing

Trailhead Park’s Splash Pad in Winter Haven, FL has provided significant value to the city’s community over the past four years. It’s become a popular spot for families to cool off in the hot Florida sun and spend time together. This 4,200 sq ft splash pad opened originally with a concrete finish, but the facility unfortunately experienced several slip and fall incidents on the slick surface. With calls from the community to improve the safety of the splash pad, the City of Winter Haven applied a popular non-skid rubberized paint to try and reduce the number of injuries. Unfortunately, the issue persisted, and the city began to research options that would yield better results so they wouldn’t have to redo the surfacing a fourth or fifth time.

Life Floor’s East Coast Regional Manager, MaryAnn Eifert, reached out to the City of Winter Haven via FRPA’s E-Connect after learning about the splash pad’s chronic slip and fall issue and introduced them to Life Floor. The city was most excited to learn about the product’s built-in slip-resistance since it had the potential to solve many of their chronic slip and fall issues. It was also happy to hear about its certification to NSF/ANSI Standard 50, which provides unbiased testing results of Life Floor’s performance. 

The City of Winter Haven had a set budget that they wanted to stay within, so MaryAnn presented our pre-established High Tide Theme paired with our economically-friendly square pattern 301. This combination simulates the blue tones of a seascape, offering a simple layout while still allowing for limitless play. By choosing this option, the city was able to stay within budget and provide Life Floor as a safety solution to the Winter Haven community. Since Life Floor is truly one of its kind being the only splash pad safety surfacing certified to NSF/ANSI Standard 50, and with Inside Edge as its certified North American Installation Partner, the facility staff was able to present this plan to city council as a sole-source bid. By using the sole-source bid model, the city was able to save more time and money by eliminating the need to bid out other products since Life Floor’s certification and benefits demonstrate that it is both unique and superior to concrete and other surfacing options.

“They gave us a design and a quote, it was in our budget and met all of our needs.”

— Andy Palmer, Parks Planning & Strategic Initiatives Manager

Once the improved surface was installed, over 1000 community members showed their support via Facebook and celebrated the City of Winter Haven for addressing such a prominent issue in the community by installing a safety surface at the Trailhead Park Splash Pad. The Winter Haven Sun then picked up the story and featured the splash pad on the front page of the newspaper in their article Upgraded Splash Pad Reopens To Smiles. 

The city staff themselves were also pleased with the results. Andy Palmer, the city’s Parks Planning & Strategic Initiatives Manager, stated how pleased he was with the entire process.

“Not only does it look awesome but it meets many criteria of fall and slip resistance ... we’ve gotten nothing but great feedback from the product and that we did something to address our slip and fall issues.”

— Andy Palmer, Parks Planning & Strategic Initiatives Manager

Palmer was also impressed with the professionalism and friendliness of Inside Edge’s installation crew.

“We work with many specialty item crews such as playground and pour-in-place rubber installers. The crew who installed the Life Floor was one of the best we have seen. They were professional, friendly, clean, and the workmanship [was] exceptional.”

— Andy Palmer, Parks Planning & Strategic Initiatives Manager

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We’d like to extend a special thank you to the City of Winter Haven for your business and collaboration in transforming your parks into a safer and more playful space for your community. Thank you as well to the Inside Edge Safety Surfaces team for your continued excellence in installation and for your commitment to Life Floor’s mission!

The Benefits of Diversifying Play Features in Aquatic Environments

Everyone experiences play in different ways. It’s the reason why there isn’t just one type of spray feature or just one type of pool. Aquatic environments are always changing and adapting to new trends and regulations in the industry. Likewise, aquatics facility directors and operators are constantly evaluating updates that will deliver increased value to their guests and members. In order to provide features that appeal to a wide variety of individuals, facility staff needs to choose what combination of elements will allow for limitless play for their intended audiences.

Providing options for guests to engage with a facility in different ways is a crucial component of play value. At Life Floor, we talk about this concept often because it’s a central tenet of why we design safety surfacing to be interactive and engaging. Play value directly influences guest perception of a facility and can be a determining factor of whether or not guests will return. For example, if a child has a better experience at a park farther away, parents may be more inclined to return to that park even if it is more inconvenient. 

One way to increase play value is to provide experiences for different age groups. Any type of water play for infants and toddlers can be seen as risky from their perspective. For instance, interacting with a simple spray feature on a splash pad is often a new and exciting experience. For older children, riding down high-speed water slides, scaling lofty towers, or getting drenched under tipping buckets can be seen as more exhilarating ways to interact with aquatic environments. These different features help shape children’s development at different stages.

Awareness of how specific age groups prefer to interact with water features can be meaningful when determining how to zone a facility properly. Lopesan’s Costa Bavaro Resort is a good example of zoning for different development stages in a child’s life. At this facility, large landscaped “islands” separate the larger risky play area, equipped with slides and high platforms, from the adjacent splash pad, where smaller children may feel more comfortable. While these zones are located on opposite sides, they are also connected across one large aquatic play area. This integration allows children the freedom to move from one area to the next, encouraging them to balance safety and adventure. When an aquatic play area offers this range of features, guests can gradually choose to engage with riskier play elements, which ultimately helps to boost both decision-making skills and self-esteem. Accommodating a variety of preferences also increases play value and enables families of all ages to enjoy these spaces for longer periods of time. 

Social interaction is another crucial part of play learning. Just as it may be difficult for a child to play house alone, it is important for them to be able to collaborate with other children in aquatic environments as part of their experience. Spray features, water tables, and interactive activities that contribute to this social play can elevate learning in both creativity and problem solving. Children are able to boost their communication and social skills as they practice working together and learning to share or compromise as they explore these environments together. 

Diversity of play is encouraged by maximizing the creative options available; however, these options don’t have to be limited to the spray features, slides, and towers on site. The design of a facility’s floor can also enhance play value by giving children the opportunity to creatively invent games based on the patterns and images below their feet. When an aquatic surface is also cushioned and slip-resistant, children can more confidently run, jump, and explore to fully enjoy all that a facility has to offer. 

By engaging with visitors more holistically across all features of an aquatic design to accommodate different age groups and comfort levels, facility supervisors, operators, and decision makers can create more encompassing parks filled with limitless possibilities for play. The experiences they offer can encourage important developmental milestones for children while also creating long-lasting family memories along the way. 

The Importance of Free Play in Aquatic Environments

Childhood is a time of limitless imagination, boundless creativity, and wild invention. It’s the one time in life when exploration is encouraged freely without the weight of daily responsibilities other than formal learning and helping with chores. The freedom of being young displays itself in many ways, one of which is free play. 

Free play is critical to a child’s development. It enables them to problem solve, think critically, develop stories, and innovate. It can be seen in activities such as building Lego sets, playing house, creating structures and gaining achievements in video games like Minecraft, strategy forming in board games, and simply running through backyards envisioning new worlds. One method of free play continues to evolve as children explore aquatic environments, such as splash pads. 

Children play at Lopesan’s Costa Bavaro Resort, Dominican Republic.

An octopus tentacle leads guests through a spray feature at Westfield Memorial Pool, NJ.

Historically, splash pads have included spray features that inspire thoughts of running under mountainous waterfalls, becoming pirates on a treasure-hunting adventure, or riding gigantic animals through vast seas. Far too often, these features have laid upon a blank canvas of abrasive concrete beckoning for inspiration. Covering this blank canvas with a specific flooring design is one way to further encourage free play. For example, a pirate-themed splash pad could round out the experience for children with an “x marks the spot,” different clues on the island to give more context, and a beach theme with blues symbolizing the water, tans symbolizing the shore, and aquatic creatures sprinkled throughout. It could even include hopscotch inlays to encourage children to jump from shape to shape to get across a certain section of the surface. This concept of adding theming to the flooring design can also help with zoning. For instance, a facility could denote a more adventurous zone with darker blues creating the “high seas” or a calmer zone with tans to portray a peaceful sand-colored beach. 

Before: Disintegrating Pour-In-Place at Wyndham Bonnet Creek, FL

After: Life Floor’s Pirate Theme at Wyndham Bonnet Creek, FL

Alternatively, surfaces can display a more simplistic, geometric pattern to encourage a different kind of free play. For example, “the floor is lava” is a common game for children to play by jumping from color to color or chasing each other around by only touching certain patterns. These activities could augment the free play made available by the water features they encounter as they run around. 

Children play on the hexagon surface at Parr Park, Grapevine, TX.

It should be noted that free play is only as free as children feel while engaging with the aquatic environment. Do they feel like they can tumble to the ground without fear of a bruised knee? Do they think they can jump around without losing their footing and slipping? Are they certain in their games that the only thrill is that of excitement and not of fear of injury? 

Life Floor strongly believes that aquatic surfaces should lessen and, if possible, eliminate fear of major injury. It’s natural to get a couple bruises playing; however, if injuries halt play then something needs to change. Our company was founded on the idea that play shouldn’t be painful. Scrapes, cuts, and concussions shouldn’t be a common occurrence on splash pads and pool decks, especially when young children could be getting their initial introductions to aquatic free play. That’s why a central tenet of our brand is safety. Our product provides safer surfaces with cushioning, impact absorption, and slip resistance, allowing kids to play freely as they were meant to play: without fear. 

For more information on the benefits of free play, please visit https://wetheparents.org/importance-of-free-play

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If you would like to discover ways you can transform the flooring at your aquatic facility, please send us a message at solutions@lifefloor.com.