Material fidelity
The image answers to the plank.
A floor is chosen from a picture and then lived with for years. The distance between those two moments is the whole discipline.
A different question.
The numbers published in this category are about persuasion — rooms visualised, conversions lifted. They are real numbers, and they answer a real question: did the picture convince someone.
It is not the question an architect asks. The one that matters here is narrower and harder to hide from — how close is the floor on the screen to the floor that arrives in the box. That is the one we would rather be answerable for.
What we refuse to do
Four refusals.
We do not choose a colour by eye.
Every CARETTA colour is read from the physical plank and written into a record. The record is the reference. An image that disagrees with it is the image that is wrong.
We do not show a floor we have not held.
No supplier’s room photograph stands in for our own floor. Every model here comes from a plank we hold and have measured — and it is that measurement, not a catalogue image, the picture has to match.
We do not beautify.
No lifted contrast, no exaggerated grain, no sheen the floor does not have. Ours is a matte floor and it is shown matte. The décor varies from plank to plank; we let it vary.
We do not present engineered as solid.
This is an SPC and ESPC floor — rigid core, printed décor layer, protective wear layer, four-sided micro-bevel. Every image here is an image of that, and of nothing borrowed.
The décor and the micro-bevel at the distance a hand reads them. Nothing added, nothing lifted — this is the surface as it lies underfoot.
The limits
What an image cannot do.
A screen is not a room. Two monitors do not agree with each other, and neither of them agrees with the light falling on your floor at four in the afternoon.
A visualisation is not a scale drawing. It will not tell you the true width of a plank underfoot. Where dimension decides, the measured plank size decides with it — 228 × 1830 mm on Navigation, 230 × 1830 mm on Deep Sea.
A colour record is a record, not a promise about photographs. It is what lets us see that an image has drifted from the material. It is not a claim that no image ever will.
This is stated here rather than in a footnote, because the alternative is to let a picture make a promise the material has to keep.
Decide on the plank, not on the screen.
A floor is judged on the floor it will live on, in the light it will live in — which is why the colour of every model is measured, and the measurement is published.
Until the plank is under your own light, this is what we hand over today: the measured colour of the model, on the record; the technical spec sheet, with the geometry and the construction; and the plank at 1:1 on every model page — the grain and the joint at their real size, with a millimetre rule, so the scale is at least not guessed.