Concrete meets combinatorics - Concrete floor theory - part 1

The best reason to saw-cut a pattern into a polished concrete floor is to add a layer of craftsmanship and precision to something that is variegated and handmade.  The challenge with this is to make sure your design is timeless.  The whole point with concrete flooring is simple elegance, and so whenever we add a layer, we must design carefully.  We want to pick patterns that are novel enough to be worth doing, but familiar enough to be comfortable.

"Tile patterns", aka grids, are the most common thing then as stained concrete is inherently novel to most, and we are very used to seeing squares in flooring.  With concrete floors, we find the prettiest sizing to be surprisingly big.  23-36" spacing makes the squares big enough to see the movement in the concrete finishing yet small enough to register as a decorative pattern.  Smaller than this doesn't look good:

A more novel pattern, though still familiar enough to be subconsciously pleasing, is a harlequin pattern.  This is just that same grid, but at 60 degrees rather than 90.  The resulting shape is a diamond with 60 and 120 degree angles.  Such a diamond also happens to be what two equilateral triangles would look like stacked.  Non of this geometric explanation is consciously thought of when you look at it, but it is part of what makes it appealing.    

Lastly to be described in Part 1 here is overlapping patterns.  Simple shapes cut to overlap and generate smaller, congruent shapes end up being timelessly appealing.  Here is a overlapping square pattern:

Here's how this all comes together to make something timeless and elegant:

This very imperfect slab had been painted to look like it was acid stained and we were called in when it started flaking off: 

The overall look before we started evoked exclamations like "meh."



After grinding it, the amount of rocks shown varied a lot, so a tight overlapping diamond pattern was cut to give that layer of precision we started this blog with.  



Like we said earlier, scored and stained concrete looks best with bold proportions.  Though this porch totaled less than 300sf, we cut diamonds over 7' long.  Once finished the tight scoring and color separations balance the natural nuances of the slab to make something that is evocative yet really old looking.  







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