Bathroom renovations during normal hotel operations
Bathroom refurnishments now and again create a lot of noise and dirt. One hotel has therefore opted for the OBTEGO system. With this system, the old tiled section is covered with printed PLEXIGLAS® Optical HC.
At some point, age starts to show on every hotel. Facades must be painted, floors redone – and bathrooms redesigned. But the Hotel Lamm in Bad Boll did not even consider removing the old tiles and replacing them with new ones. Because if there is something that a hotel can do without, it’s noise, dirt and long construction periods.
“We wanted to renovate our bathrooms as quickly as possible and also with as little noise disturbance as possible during the normal hotel operations,” says Heike Kauderer, owner of Hotel Lamm. After all, each day that a hotel has to close for renovations costs money. To prevent the hotel from turning into a construction site, the management opted for bathroom refurbishments with OBTEGO by Murodesign. This is a wall cladding system made of PLEXIGLAS® Optical HC and a stabilizing support sheet. “The advantage of our system is that it can be glued directly onto the existing tiled section or can be affixed with the help of a substructure,” explains Erik Welmans, Managing Director of Murodesign. “Tiles which are now out of fashion and grouting which has become unsightly can disappear behind a large-scale, grout-free cladding.”
Easy to clean
PLEXIGLAS® Optical HC can withstand the constant change in temperature and the high humidity in the bathroom without difficulty. At the same time, the surface can be easily cleaned and is not sensitive to common household detergents – an important factor for hotel bathrooms which need to be cleaned very frequently. Read more: Cleaning and maintaining PLEXIGLAS® correctly.
Customized bathroom design
The high-gloss panels are available, for example, in a single color and in a wood or stone look. “For this, we print a transparent PLEXIGLAS® Optical HC sheet on one side with the desired pattern,” Welmans explains. The brand acrylic glass from Röhm provides a high level of transparency for an excellent depth effect. “This creates a very nice glass look which really brings out the underlying motif,” says Welmans “The patterns are often so similar to the original material that you hardly see a difference.” If the choice of 18 patterns is not enough, the plates can also be printed with an individual design – this was how the Hotel Lamm chose a photo of a stream which, as a shower wall, now makes the bathrooms an atmospheric oasis of tranquility.
Cut directly on-site
"Thanks to the scratch-resistant surface of the PLEXIGLAS® Optical HC, the cladding looks as good after a few years as it did on the first day."
- Erik Welmans
Managing Director at Murodesign
During normal opening hours, the individual bathrooms of the hotel were gradually renovated with the wall cladding system. “Because we didn’t have to knock any tiles down, the work did not produce a great deal of noise and didn’t produce very much building rubble. It was also completed in a short amount of time. Our guests barely noticed anything,” says Heike Kauderer from the Hotel Lamm. To this end, the individual wall panels were completely assembled at Murodesign’s main plant in Kamp-Lintfort. The finished modules were then cut to size by the assembly specialists from OBTEGO directly at the hotel. “PLEXIGLAS® is easy to process mechanically, something that is not possible with glass,” says Welmans.
Solutions for small bathrooms
The panels were then glued directly onto the old, cleaned tiled section. “Typically, hotels have small bathrooms. This is why we often use a gluing system, because it is simply thinner,” says Welmans. Alternatively, the plates can be mounted as a front-wall installation on the four-centimeter-thick frame system. The advantage: The cladding is then reversible by means of a clip technique and can, for example, be removed at any time if there are supply lines behind it – or if the existing decor is to be replaced with a new one. “But that would just be for design reasons. Thanks to the scratch-resistant coated surface of the PLEXIGLAS® Optical HC, the cladding looks as good after a few years as it did on the first day,” Welmans emphasizes.