Retail spaces such as jewelry stores often require flooring that enhances the overall shopping experience while remaining durable enough for daily foot traffic. Polished concrete floors are popular in luxury retail environments because their reflective surface improves lighting and highlights merchandise displays. However, many retail spaces in multi-story buildings are built with gypsum underlayments, commonly known as gypcrete, which cannot be mechanically polished like traditional concrete slabs.
To achieve the polished concrete look in these situations, contractors often install a microtopping or microcement that creates a new cement-based surface over the existing floor. These thin overlays can be applied in multiple layers to produce a smooth, seamless finish that mimics the appearance of polished concrete.
Microcement systems such as Skraffino are designed to bond well to properly prepared substrates, allowing installers to transform existing gypcrete floors without removing the original underlayment. Once the overlay is installed, it can be colored and refined to create the desired decorative effect.
The finished surface is then sealed using durable protective coatings that help protect the floor from abrasion, stains, and everyday retail traffic. Because the system adds minimal thickness while delivering a modern seamless appearance, microcement overlays have become a popular solution for retail renovations.
This approach allows designers and contractors to achieve the elegant look of polished concrete even when the underlying floor cannot be polished directly.
Sometimes there are many solutions, and sometimes there is just one. For those rare instances when you need a polished concrete flooring over a gypsum concrete substrate, our Skraffino microtopping is the only overlay on the market that will adhere. Typical overlays simply won’t bond.
Just ask Tom Zilian, President of Madstone LLC in Rhode Island, who needed to resurface the floor of a high-profile client, national Jewelry retailer, Alex and Ani.
As a retail Jewelry store, appearance is everything, especially at a flagship store. So when Alex and Ani wanted to have their new 5000 square feet of floors, including back office spaces, polished and colored, the job had to be done well. Except that the existing substrate was made of gypsum concrete which is generally not polishable.
Every job has its challenges, and its solutions. Tom Zilian had a lot of experience with Duraamen products. He was aware of Skraffino and knew that it was his only hope for working with gypsum sub floor. He also knew that Skraffino could easily be combined with Colorfast and other Duraamen products to meet the demanding design needs of the client. With Skraffino, for best results we recommend applying one coat of CP1000 with a garden sprayer the day before the job, and a second coat the day of the job.
For the Alex and Ani project, Skraffino was applied using Magic Trowels. Once the microtopping was put down, the floor was screened (100-grit), vacuumed and washed. Then a clear coat of our water based epoxy primer/sealer Perdure E32 was applied, and to protect the epoxy, a clear Perdure U50 Polyurethane Sealer.
“The amazing thing is that you can put all this down on a floor and it’s only 1/8 inch thick,” says Victor Pachade, General Manager of Duraamen. “And it looks amazingly good.” As Alex and Ani Jewelers found out, Skraffino for gypsum subfloor is the gold standard.
Their new floor looked so good that not long after the project was completed, another jewelry store called us about our products. You can’t get much more of an endorsement than that. According to Zilian, “Skraffino is a great way to resurface a concrete floor.” And in this case, it was the only way.
Please Contact Us for your next polished concrete project over gypsum sub-floor.
