Carpet is making a comeback in French interiors

Unexpected, as the image of carpet among individuals has gone out of fashion, victim of criticism and competition from laminate parquet or clip-on PVC floors, sales are today riding on the attraction for design achievements made possible by new processes.

But one major element still escapes the metamorphosis: oil remains the main material used in the manufacture of carpets, for the fibers and the backings. Even wool carpets contain it.

“We have evolved a lot and it is not over, we are now moving towards recycled yarns,” assures Marc Welcomme, general director of the French Union of Rugs and Carpets (UFTM). “Reproducing a drawing has become technically very easy,” he says for example.

The colors (manufacturers use solution-dyed yarns which are more resistant to cleaning), the texturing (as if we were sculpting the carpet), the cutting (optimized to save waste) have also changed.

For the past year, choosing carpet for your interior is no longer a taboo and architecture and decoration magazines are talking about "revival".

"We wondered for a long time how far the decline would go. Now we are rather in a rebound phase, not in quantity but in value. When people come back, they want beauty, quality", relates Bruno Sevin , France sales director at Balsan (Belgian group Belgotex) which has two factories near Chateauroux (Indre).

He places the peak of sales in the mid-1980s. During the glorious period which preceded, carpet was massively deployed, orange, blue, etc., sometimes even on the walls of pretty interior pavilions, before the backlash began. arrived.

Market shares will decrease "from the 1990s", says Mr. Welcomme. From 2007 to 2022, sales volumes contracted by a quarter, according to its figures and the sector hit rock bottom in the year of Covid, with 27,7 million m2 sold, before rising again to 40 million m2 in 2022.

Accused of being polluting, a vector of allergies or a nest for dust mites, which the profession denounces as a misunderstanding, carpet has in fact never lost favor with customers in offices, hotels or its soundproofing properties. work miracles.

The same goes for trade shows where carpet is almost a disposable commodity, regularly denounced by associations like Zero Waste.

Decorative signature

The sector has largely declined with the fall in sales. The number of French establishments has shrunk (27 remain compared to 38 in 2013), as has the number of employees (-24% in ten years to a thousand employees) and the French share in European production (6% ) dominated by Belgian and Dutch manufacturers, according to sector research firm Xerfi.

In the Parisian showroom opened by Balsan in 2017, the tide is turning, however, according to Mr. Sevin who assures that the interior designers and fitters who push the door are amazed: “We manage to surprise them! There is a wow effect !”

Among other technical advances, “we are able to make patterns, not by printing, but with mass-dyed yarn which pixelates the carpet,” he says. The advantage is that it no longer discolors when you rub it to clean it. “This is of great interest to hotels.”

Carpet is now establishing itself as a decorative signature in its own right, bringing sensuality. “People are not just visual,” explains London designer Tom Dixon on the website of the major Danish manufacturer Ege. He is one of those who see the carpet as an object which controls the space through its dimensions and the solicitation of senses other than sight: touch, walking, acoustics.

Historically, carpeting has been an English passion since the 18th century. Woven, it is then a luxury and in France, it arrives in bourgeois buildings, their staircases, ministries, the National Assembly.

It was in the United States that carpet made its mass revolution in the middle of the 20th century: new tufting machines, lined with rows of hundreds of needles, propelled the rates to a level never seen before and produced rolls sized to widths of a room wall to wall.

Quick installation, affordable price, synthetic fiber, real estate developers love it and the sector will become almost an annex of petrochemicals, conquering the land of offices then new residential thanks to the boom in construction and access to property after the Second World War. The key word is quantity.

For the brands that have survived, marketing no longer has anything to do with it. Brochures now talk about “eco-design”, “design”, “captured dust” or “explosion of colors”.