Story at a glance:
- Wilmot Sanz chose a rubber backed sheet flooring product that helped with both patient safety and noise at the UVA Health Infusion and Specialty Care Pantops center in Charlottesville.
- ECOsurfaces’ new Valera RXT, launched in 2025, provide a lot of benefits to health care staff, including comfort and acoustic benefits.
Flooring plays a critical role in health care spaces. For the design team behind UVA Health Infusion and Specialty Care Pantops, flooring underwent rigorous testing and was an important factor from day one.
Durability, cleanability, comfort, and acoustics were among the benefits the Wilmot Sanz team looked for when choosing flooring for the Pantops center in Charlottesville, according to Amanda Ripley, associate principal at Wilmot Sanz and lead interior designer on the project. Wilmot Sanz is an architecture firm focused 100% on health care projects.
Furniture plays a crucial role in health care centers. The UVA infusion and specialty care center design includes the Infusion Bay Recliner Manufacturer from the La-Z-Boy Healthcare | Knú Comfort Durable Series, seen here in blue. Photo by Edward Caruso Photography, courtesy of Wilmot Sanz
For the UVA center the team specified durable and easy-to-maintain ECOsurfaces throughout the infusion area in various styles and colors from Ecore’s Rx Collection. ECOsurfaces is sold and distributed through Spartan Surfaces. “We have to make sure with any system that they’re able to clean the floor. We do not want bacterial growth in these types on environments,” Ripley says. “It needs to be easily cleanable. That’s why we recommend mockups to test out the flooring with the different health systems.”
That a wide array of Rx solutions would be used throughout a cancer center came to no surprise to Chuck Wilson, vice president of product and technical at ECOsurfaces. He’s been in the flooring industry for more than 20 years and had his own personal experience inside a cancer center.
“I will always tell you, the staff who work inside an infusion center are very special people. They take really great care and try to be as quiet as they can. But you can only be so quiet if you don’t have the right tools, and that includes the floor,” Wilson says. “A lot of people don’t think about the floor, but it’s critical. There are a lot of rolling loads, whether it’s a stool or a cart rolling through. That vulcanized composition rubber muscle (made from recycled tires) underneath that surface layer is providing a lot of acoustic benefits to the patients.”
A lot of people don’t think about the floor, but it’s critical.
The team at Wilmot Sanz tested the flooring ultimately used at Pantops for all manner of benefits, including ensuring they installed a flooring product that could help withstand patient falls as well as provide better ergonomics for staff. “We went with a rubber backed sheet flooring product that helped with both the patient safety and noise concerns noted by the system,” Ripley says. “The flooring helps reduce the impact of a fall as well as providing comfort underfoot. It has cushion, which provides benefits ergonomically to all.”
She says staff already reported an improvement in back pain, too, once the new floor was installed. Wilson says he also heard from a nurse at another project that she stopped taking pain medication for her back six months after working on ECOsurfaces flooring.
Ripley says the rubber backing also helps to improve the acoustics of spaces. “You don’t hear footsteps or passing conversations as much,” she says. “It helps create a more zen, quiet area. We do have high NRC acoustic ceiling tiles, but the flooring really helped to quiet the space.”
Ripley says there continues to be a great demand for low-maintenance, durable flooring in health care spaces. Wilmot Sanz spends months with a larger design team doing mockups and then testing any flooring before committing to using it in any project. “We want to make sure the product can withstand rolling loads; there’s a lot of equipment and carts passing through, so we want to make sure we’re providing products that withstand all of that, whether it be tile or sheet products.”
The team will see how flooring looks and feels over time as well as how it holds up to the demands of cleaning protocols and equipment traffic. “It has to be highly durable. We never put in something new before testing it out,” Ripley says.
The Latest in Flooring
Rendering courtesy of ECOsurfaces
Flooring solutions like the Rx Collection or ECOsurfaces’ new Valera RXT, launched earlier in 2025, also provide a lot of benefits to staff, like comfort underfoot, and sustainability benefits to help make projects greener. Using ECOsurfaces helped Wilmot Sanz earn LEED points because of the flooring’s recycled content, Ripley says.
ECOsurfaces manufactures healthier flooring like Valera RXT and ECOsurfaces using recycled tires, or Vulcanized Composition Rubber. “We’re creating a muscle on the floor for the end user,” Wilson says.
Graphic by Michael Esposito
Valera RXT is the first performance surface plank designed for commercial spaces, he says. Featuring a durable 2-millimeter vinyl layer fused to a 3-millimeter vulcanized rubber base, it delivers enhanced safety, ergonomics, and acoustics compared to standard LVT products. A realistic wood plank design also offers added style. “It really builds in nicely to our overall RX line,” Wilson says.
Valera RXT also fills a need when it comes to replaceability in health care flooring, Wilson says. “In sheet vinyl if you get a damaged sheet you can do an overlay drop and cut the square out and put a new square in, but then you’re going to heat weld it and it’s an eyesore. Because we utilize a pressure-sensitive adhesive, you can take one plank up and replace it and put a new plank down if it gets damaged. That’s really beneficial in a lot of spaces.”
A continued reduction in noise is also helpful, he says, and design teams appreciate the aesthetics of the on-trend wood looks. Designers can mix and match easily with RXT, choosing from a color palette of 12 colors, from warm to cool.
Sustainability
Used tires travel along the conveyor belt at the beginning of their transformation into sustainable, high-performance flooring materials for Ecore. Photo courtesy of Ecore
ECOsurfaces takes part in diverting 430 million pounds of commercial tires from landfills annually, avoiding 9.5 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. This isn’t just for RXT; ECOsurfaces boasts thousands of product variations made from reclaimed rubber. ECOsurfaces has partners across industries—the built environment, tire maintenance, trucking, distribution fleets, and more—who help identify and collect discarded rubber materials. Then they transform it, cleaning and grinding the rubber waste to remove impurities and create new high-performance products.
While Wilson has generally seen the flooring industry evolve over the years to become more sustainable, some products on the market still aren’t as environmentally friendly as they claim to be, he says. “I had a long history in hardwood, and everybody talked about bamboo being revolutionary in terms of sustainability. Bamboo, in and of itself, is sustainable. It’s going to regenerate really quickly. However, it’s not designed to be a floor,” he says. “They would literally strip and shred down the bamboo and then put it back together with adhesive to compress it. Then you put it on a ship and send it over from China. Think about what a carbon footprint you’ve just created.”
On the flip side, he says ECOsurfaces is quite literally diverting waste from the landfill. “We’re not getting rid of tires anytime soon, but how do we put them to a better use at the end of their life? We’ve done that tremendously well,” Wilson says.
ECOsurfaces tests all of its products for VOCs and heavy metals, too. “We’re making sure there’s none of that,” Wilson says.
What is Valera RXT?
This new flooring launched in 2025 was designed to reduce noise, promote comfort underfoot, and improve overall safety. It also:
- is easy to maintain and sanitize
- is made with reclaimed rubber material
- is durable
- is easy to install
- reduces structure-borne noise
- returns energy to user
- provides comfort underfoot
- lowers in-room impact sound.
