Oak Country in water park H2O Herford / Germany

Natural oiled wooden floors and wet areas is not a conflict. Recently shown in the marvellous water park H2O in Herford in Germany. As we have posted in one of our previous blog entries it is no problem to use mafi floorings in wet condition areas. Far from it, it is absolutely heavenly to walk barefoot on such warm and cosy floors like them.
Architect Dipl.-Ing. Hans-Reiner Wörmann planned about 300 sqm of the mafi Oak Country, brushed and natural oiled in one of their recreation areas.  Really neat design that was finally installed by our partner  Wachsmuth Parkett.

Have a look on some of these fantastic pictures.

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Antibacterial ingredients in mafi oil and soap

mafi was always working with natural product. Also our oils and soaps are naturally produced and certified to make you feel comfortable in your house.

The white pigments in mafi oil and soap are nanotechnical highlights. The TiO2 – Titanium Dioxide particals are a natural filter and cleaner in the surface of your mafi floor.
When TiO2 reacts with light and sunshine a photo catalytic mechanism is cleaning the surface and also the air. This is why mafi oiled floors makes you feel comfortable in rooms.

For detailed information please follow the links belox:

photcatalytic effect
TiO2 – Titanium Dioxide
photcatalytic slef cleaning (german)

The benefits of wood

People feel good in rooms with wood

Our health is a big and important part of our life. As mankind lives and has lived with wood for all his life we are connected together. This is why we sometimes can’t tell why we feel so comfortable in a room or not.
It often happens because of the perfect climate and humidity wood provides in areas we spend our time. You can even prove it – people sit in a restaurant with a natural wooden floor longer and feel better than in a restaurant with any other floor – and this results in drinking more.

Have a look at these statistics:

A floor is “Feet warm” with a guide number of max. 0,2.  If the floor is too cold, people get a cold more easily.
Warm guide number of wood: 0,16 W / mK

To compare:

• cork = 0,05
• ground screed = 0,65
• stone or marble = 3,00
• concrete = 2,0

People only take liquid when their feet are warm. With cold feet people don’t drink and consume as much as they do with warm feet. This is the reason why bars, restaurants and pubs have wooden floors, because people should feel good and enjoy themselves.

Wood is antibacterial

With the open pore surface you get a good atmosphere and it is antibacterial. The floor absorbs pollutants like smoke. Please click here for more information on the  antibacterial effect Gilbert & Watson, 1971, Ak et al. 1994b; Abrishami et al., 1994

People would rather book a hotel room with a wooden floor than a carpeted floor. The reason for this is that most people feel uncomfortable and unhygienic. The floor could be very clean but people think it’s still dirty.

The antiseptic effect of a wooden floor makes it ideal for sensitive people or those suffering from allergies. This is also a reason to choose a natural wooden floor for a hotel.  Micro-organisms can survive a long time on synthetic fibres where they also breed, they do not survive on wood.

Regulation of air humidity

Through regular damp wiping with mafi Wood Floor Soap the floor absorbs moisture that it later emits into the room. In this way the wood ensures a balanced moisture exchange and a healthy room atmosphere. The oiled surface makes the wood almost as breathable as it is in its natural state (approx. 80%). The floor can breathe.

Learn more about air humidity – from Tim Padfield

mafi story:

There was a project in Switzerland. It was a semi-detached house with a mafi natural wooden floor on one side and a stone floor on the other. The owner with the natural wooden floor had to put on the underfloor heating much later than the one with the stone floor because natural wood has a warmth and stone floor feels colder quicker. The man living in the wooden floor house had warmer feet whereby it wasn’t necessary  for him to turn the underfloor heating on while his neighbour with the stone floor had to turn his underfloor heating on earlier.

The next thing that the customer told us was, that he saved 25 % in heating costs, due to the wooden floors.

The reason why he didn’t have to turn the temperature up so high was because the floor felt naturally warm. You don’t need to turn on the floor heating to 24 or 25 degrees as you normally do. For the same feeling you only need to turn on the heating for natural oiled wooden floors to 18 to 20 degrees to get the same feeling. Additionally it is a benefit to your health.

So this is one of the reasons why we lay mafi floors also in bathrooms and wellness areas.

wood – human – health / mafi floors for clinical practices

It’s not a secret anymore that wood as a natural material is in a very unique constellation with human and health. As long as the wood is left in a natural way and not is laquered it can spread all the positive benefits that comes with nature.

Fritz Fillafer, founder and CEO of mafi, knows a lot of  wooden floors and characteristics. He was interviewed in an Austrian floor magazine where he stated that wooden floors are perfect for clinical practices where hygienic standards are very high. Fillafer proved the theory with tests and papers by the Institute of Building Biology and Ecology Neubeuern, Germany and the Institute for Environmental Medicine and Hospital Hygiene at the University Freiburg, Germany.

Due to the fact that more bacterias are able to survive on plastic materials than on wood, a dentist in Switzerland already installed a mafi floor instead of typical “hygienic” plastic floors. Even if Pines are especially recommandable also the Tigeroak in the swiss practice is proper for clinical use.

Other attributes of natural oiled wooden floors:

• regulation of room humidity
• free from static electricity
• diffusibility
• warmer feeling beacuase of brushed and oiled finish (compared to all other surfaces and finishes)
• filtrates cigarette smoke
• …

For more information please visit the mafi website.

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