The installer’s view

Texaa and you go back a long way.

Yes. I first came across Texaa in 2005. At that time I was a drywall installer moving on to better things. I visited the Texaa stand at an exhibition. I met some of your team members, who showed me the products and the concepts with amazing enthusiasm. It struck me immediately. Then the day I visited the workshop in Gradignan outside Bordeaux, I felt that family spirit straightaway and the passion for quality work. The whole Texaa team has that passion! So, I read up about acoustic reverberation and trained with the design department and so on. And today I only work for Texaa! For me it’s a perfect work environment with quality products, the workshop and its speed of response and that customer focus.

What are the main qualities of Vibrasto for an installer?

Well, firstly it stretches slightly, which makes it very easy to work with. Then fitting it is so easy. The installation system is simple, effective and always works, whatever state the support surface is in. Not so long ago, we installed Vibrasto in three halls in the Montpellier law courts. You won’t believe the state the walls were in, when we took the old cladding off! But it didn’t matter, the job went very well and finished, it looks really good! The 150-cm width of the strips is a real help, because you can install them single-handed. And what I really like about Vibrasto, is how you sink into it when you touch it, which is down to the density of the sound-absorbing panel behind the covering. It makes for a very soft, warm finish.

You’ve just delivered an acoustic improvement project in the Pollen restaurant in Avignon, which has one Michelin star. Vibrasto was a major component of this project. What were your main challenges?

Yes, that’s right, we installed Vibrasto in practically all the different ways the system allows: in great swathes on the ceiling with recessed spotlights and without, as cladding on the walls and oak framed panels on the walls. The actual installation method is more or less the same everywhere, although it’s more difficult in some places than in others. The easiest is on the walls: you start at the top and let the strips fall. On the ceiling, you have to find a way to hold the strips up, so that they don’t fall to the floor as you’re fixing them. Especially since here, we were using light colours for a slightly tone-on-tone effect, because the owner wanted the acoustic solutions not to stand out too much, while being stylish at the same time. So, in terms of the challenges, there were three really: fitting the Vibrasto above the spotlights, hiding the air conditioning and the dimensions of the ceiling surfaces with very long strip lengths. That and making the oak frames to stretch the Vibrasto over.

How do you fit Vibrasto above spotlights?

So, first you fix the battens to the ceiling: in this case, these were 30 mm thick, because we were fitting the Vibrasto 30 system. I initially dismantle the spotlights and then hold the absorber panel in place and cut out the area where the spotlight fits. I add in a wooden plate, to fix the light to. I then fix the Vibrasto, having marked where the spotlight is going to be. All I have to do then is make two small, crossed cuts with the scissors in the cladding and pull the light cable through. I reconnect the spotlight and stretch the cladding on its battens.

What’s the wildest Vibrasto project you’ve done

One I did recently! Cladding the inside of the dome at the Clermont-Ferrand Polydome. So, imagine a 15-metre-high truncated cone with a maximum circumference of 12 metres and 8 metres at the narrowest point. I had to fix the battens around the curve of the cone and clip the material to them. Then I trimmed the excess material along the edge of the batten and used the knife one last time to push the edges into the batten. This was one of the most technically challenging jobs I have had: 780 linear metres of battens fixed to a very specially shaped support, ten days’ work, fitting 20 to 25 square metres of Vibrasto per day up on scaffolding! I had to really stretch the material hard to compensate for the changing diameter of the circles. That’s what makes Vibrasto so cool; it can be applied to such a variety of situations that I never get bored because it pushes me to grow my expertise.