Musselman & Hall Contractors Receive Award for Starbucks Sustainable Bomanite Modena SL Polished Concrete Floor

The General Contractor, J.E. Foster Building Company, contacted Bomanite Licensee, Musselman & Hall Contractors, LLC about a new Starbucks Coffeehouse being built in the Brookside community of Kansas City. Starbucks was considering the incorporation of new flooring material in a prototype store.

Starbucks design studios are located around the world so that their designers can fully understand the communities they serve. The mission of each designer is to create a spectacular Starbucks café experience that is steeped in the local culture and reflects the unique characteristics of each neighborhood.

Starbucks Coffeehouse Brookside Creates Community Design with Bomanite Modena SL Polished Concrete Floors in Kansas City installed by Musselman and Hall

Starbucks believes a coffeehouse should be a welcoming, inviting and familiar place for people to connect, so they design their stores to reflect the unique character of the neighborhoods they serve. They are also interested in the way design can connect everyone to sustainable building practices and provoke thoughtful questions and engagement with the built environment. To guide their building and design efforts, Starbucks uses the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED® certification program as a benchmark for success.  In addition to reducing energy and water consumption, they incorporate reused and recycled materials wherever possible and often use locally inspired design details and materials in their stores.

After some research and several references, the general contractor worked with the local contractor Musselman & Hall for assistance. Based on a tile sample provided by the Starbucks design team and an overall design concept, Musselman & Hall produced a series of Bomanite Custom Polishing Modena SL samples for the client’s consideration. The samples immediately impressed the Starbucks staff.

Starbucks Coffeehouse Brookside Creates Community Design with Bomanite Modena SL Polished Concrete Floors in Kansas City installed by Musselman and Hall

The Modena System, unique to Bomanite, is a trowel applied cementitious overlay that contains zero VOC and no solvents in the chemically hardening product with attributes to its “Low-Emitting Materials” LEED credits. Modena is polished to a highly durable finish and is commonly used to renovate floors that are unacceptable candidates for polished concrete. It can be applied as thin as 1/8” or as thick as ¾” dependent upon existing elevations. Modena can be either highly decorative with aggregate exposure or simpler with light aggregate exposure similar to finely ground concrete.

The Modena system contributes to additional LEED accrual points in “Innovation by Design” by its ability to renovate an existing concrete slab that would otherwise be unsuitable for concrete polishing. This provides specifiers the ability to use polished concrete much as they would traditionally select a manufactured tile or other flooring system only without the maintenance requirements. Bomanite Modena is more economical than typical terrazzo, is breathable which minimizes moisture vapor issues, can be colored in any color, lessens the amount of product brought to a jobsite compared to stone or tile and provides all the benefits of polished concrete.

The relatively small project (600 SF) utilized the Bomanite Nickel Gray Integrally Colored Bomanite Modena SL system. The polished overlay was placed at approximately ½” thick. The overlay was ground and polished to a 400-grit finish. Musselman & Hall coordinated with Starbucks artist who utilized a portion of the floor as a canvas to paint a fun and colorful mural. This is the first Starbucks location in the region to utilize the Bomanite Custom Polishing Modena SL flooring system.

The finished floor is a simple, but elegant representation of the design flexibility of decorative architectural concrete and Bomanite’s diverse sustainable offering of floor systems.

AWARDS: 2018 Bomanite Custom Polishing Project – Honorable Mention

Starbucks Coffeehouse Brookside Creates Community Design with Bomanite Modena SL Polished Concrete Floors in Kansas City installed by Musselman and Hall
Starbucks Coffeehouse Brookside Creates Community Design with Bomanite Modena SL Polished Concrete Floors in Kansas City installed by Musselman and Hall