Cult Classics Grounds Shaw Contract in Enduring Design

^{Article Published by INTERIOR DESIGN}

The path to Shaw Contract's latest launch ran through retro advertising, vintage magazines, music, and literature—an analog repertoire of references, artifacts, and ephemera from eras gone by. From that archive came Cult Classics, a carpet tile and broadloom collection that reinterprets the visual touchstones of the past for commercial interiors. Designer Sydney Blincoe, who led the collection's creation, recalls how that material accumulated. “Each of us on the design team brought different personal nostalgic influences and inspiration to the process,” she says. “We blended and layered together elements of classic textiles, architecture, and graphic references.”

 ^{Offbeat Broadloom in Vintage}

The instinct matched what the company had been tracking at scale. Cult Classics grew out of Design for All, the trend forecast that guides Shaw Contract's color and pattern direction. “As we explored how people are seeking deeper connections in a rapidly changing world, one theme kept emerging: a desire for designs that honor heritage, evoke memories, and create a sense of belonging,” says Reesie Duncan, Vice President of Global Design.

Moving the research from page to loom took sustained experimentation. “The early stages involved a lot of prototyping,” Blincoe says. “The tufting machines chosen for this collection allow for the yarns and colors to interact in a variety of different ways within a pattern. We tried many variations and narrowed down texture and certain graphic elements this way, then used those as building blocks for the collection.” The carpet tile, offered in an 18-by-36 format that gives designers room to zone and compose spaces, arrives in three styles, First Edition, Reissue, and Remaster, alongside two broadloom companions, Offbeat and Grid Line.

^{Remaster Tile in Iconic + Archival and First Edition Tile in Iconic}

Each style came out of a different line of testing. “First Edition borrows some of the design elements from Offbeat, layering and distorting them almost like intersecting lines of type,” Blincoe explains. “Reissue was the result of testing textures and yarn mixing, blending and isolating colors to create the soft, textile-informed visual. Remaster was another exploration of how simple texture, scale, and repetition can create an overall pattern.” Distinct as they are, the trio shares a palette: twelve neutral-forward colorways balancing warm and cool hues, guided by the Connection palette within Design for All and by the muted tones that increasingly act as neutrals in interiors. “We created new yarns and utilized different yarn types to create the specific blends we wanted,” Blincoe notes.

The tiles are engineered with equal deliberateness, tufted from solution-dyed EcoSolution Q100 nylon on carbon-neutral EcoWorx BIO backing and supported by the brand's re[TURN] reclamation program, while multi-directional patterning eases installation and trims waste. 

^{Reissue Tile in Iconic + Dye Lab Tile in Rust and Offbeat Broadloom in Vintage}

Offbeat and Grid Line, those broadloom companions, were among the first designs created for the collection, and the wall-to-wall format shaped what followed. The nostalgic sensibility lent itself naturally to continuous surfaces, Blincoe says, and the medium offered capabilities its modular counterparts could not match. “Broadloom is great for structured patterning that cannot be achieved in modular flooring products, so we really leaned into that with these two styles.”

Rounded out by custom rugs, with coordinating LVT and porcelain to come, the collection arrives as a complete system, its colorways and patterning aligned so the formats move seamlessly through a single project.