Concrete Decor - Index

Concrete Decor - CDNLSeptember08 - Index

110 people in the field.”
The Walkers have had to scurry to adapt,
but that’s pretty much what they’ve been
doing over the entire history of the company.
“We had to shift gears from residential
to more commercial work,” says Monte.
“We’ve got an envelope of activities now.”
And the residential business hasn’t
completely evaporated. But it’s more in the
line of enhancement and beautification work
than major new construction.
Commercial projects such as
restaurants, hotels, nightclubs and the
grand foyer of the Silverton Casino Lodge
are paying the bulk of the bills today.
In the case of the Silverton, their
beautification of the 3,800-square foot
foyer started with pre-leveling the recessed
floor. “Then we coated it with a chemically
reactive stain and concrete dye to mimic
8 · ALL ACCESS · SEPTEMBER 2008
water flowing out of a free-standing fish
tank that’s in the foyer,” says Matt Walker.
The wet, glistening appearance is an
attention-grabber. “It’s received a lot of foot
traffic in the four years since we completed
it, and it still looks great,” Matt says.
Another recent project, at the Mirage,
is what Monte calls “one of the most
challenging jobs we’ve ever done.”
As part of the south entrance renovation,
Chief Concrete laid 6,000 square feet of
Lithocrete, an exposed aggregate product,
on the walkway where the casino faces the
very busy Las Vegas Boulevard. “They had
to keep the casino entrance open, so it was
always a matter of working around people,”
says Matt.
In other, less bustling towns, the crew
might have simply waited until closing time
and worked the graveyard shift. In Vegas,
there’s no such thing.
“It was kind of a hopscotch job,” Matt
recalls. “We’d start it at 2 a.m. and we were
still working around foot traffic.”
“It slows down from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m., but
then you’re dealing with the drunks,” says
project manager Bill Somyak from Westar
Architects, the project’s architectural firm.
The challenge, in addition to the city’s
insomnia, was matching multiple color
mixtures and staying true to a pattern of
recycled glass that was broadcast into the
mix.
“The design was amorphous, very
meandering,” says Somyak. “There were
multiple color aggregates and three
different backgrounds.”
A lot to keep track of in the middle of
the night — with a few passersby who
are meandering even more wildly than the