How Monforts Montex 6500 Stenter Helps Netherlands-based Tapetex Meet World Class Quality Standards

Dyeing, Printing, Processing

How Monforts Montex 6500 Stenter Helps Netherlands-based Tapetex Meet World Class Quality Standards

The exclusive wall covering collections of Tapetex, based in Helmond, Netherlands, are to be found in the very best guest rooms of the world’s finest hotels, in executive boardrooms and offices besides top-of-the-range luxury new housing from Europe to the USA and to the Middle East as well as Asia.

The family-owned company, with a 50-strong workforce at the plant in Helmond, takes the finest fabrics of Europe’s most advanced weaving mills – pure silks, linens, jacquards, wools as well as suede – to turn them into unique collections through a combination of in-house design knowhow and advanced finishing techniques.

“Our aim is to always come up with materials that other companies simply can’t make,” said Managing Director Bart van den Broek, whose father founded the company in 1975 as a trading operation, before deciding to bring full finishing processes in-house, a decade later, in order to be completely in control of quality and the just-in-time distribution network. “From the beginning, we opted to concentrate solely on wall coverings and our collections are now well known to architects worldwide. Manufacturers for other markets attempt to enter the field quite often, but find it harder than they anticipated because it’s a complex market. They come and go,” he said.

The Tapetex plant is equipped with the latest technology for laminating, embossing, dyeing, double-sided coating, heat setting, crushing, flocking, laser engraving and digital printing, besides conventional printing, including a Monforts Thermex dyeing line for both wovens as well as nonwovens.

The company’s latest digital printing line is capable of simultaneously printing three different designs on 110 cm diameter jumbo rolls. Sometime this year, a 2.2 metre wide, six-chamber Monforts Montex 6500 stenter was installed at a new 4,000 square metre expansion at the Helmond site.

“An older stenter is still being used for more limited runs, but with the new Montex line we can do much more. It has allowed us to introduce a number of new processes which were previously not possible. We can run coating and finishing processes which need better temperature, moisture, and air speed parameters in a much more controlled way,” he added.

It is one of the most meticulously clean plants in the world, and in as an extra measure, all fabrics are brushed as an initial step in eliminating dust or potential contaminants before initiating the processes of finishing as well as converting.

“We need to be sure every metre of fabric is perfect from the first to the very last of a production run. It’s about reliability and repeatability. The Montex 6500 stenter has been running very well and gives us complete computerised control of all parameters such as temperature, moisture and setting times. We make all our own finishing chemicals and dyes in-house and try to do as much as possible ourselves. We deal with a lot of expensive woven materials and quality has to be guaranteed – especially if an order is being shipped to the other side of the world from here” he said.

“With these kinds of fabrics, even the smallest of mistakes can be very expensive. There can be anywhere up to ten separate stages to the finishing of some of these fabrics, so we rely on the best computerised technology,” he said. Tapetex collections are generally subtle and subdued, with an understated appearance often belying the sophisticated techniques behind their creation.

A material like Graphic Spirit, for example, is a tri-dimensional suede wall covering which has intricate laser cut patterns revealing the nonwoven polyester base fabric and with silver and gold touches imprinted around its 3D crenulations.

Tech Inspirations, meanwhile, is a linen which has been cleverly embossed in variegated grid lines, its design trialled on a lead template, so that its shimmers as the eye moves across it and the viewer moves across a room, while Crafty Deformation has a very fine 10% polyester warp thread running through its enhanced linen structure.

These are just three examples of the close to 400 fabrics in widths of 110 cm or 137 cm rolls which Tapetex currently sells to over 70 countries worldwide through its sales offices and agents.

“Our customers generally like to order at the very last minute that a job is specified and appreciate the ready availability of what they want, which can be shipped anywhere in the world in a matter of days. We have established a very good logistics network worldwide,” he said.

Tapetex collections are designed and their processing routes perfected over a three-year period. They are made available for around the same time before being updated.

The company is currently putting together its latest range of wall coverings based on both wet laid and spun bonded nonwovens.

“Again, many of these products are supplied in several laminated layers with several coatings and usually double-calendered to provide the perfect finish we need. Our nonwovens collections are not cheap, but the materials fall between the general market for vinyl wall coverings and our high-end wovens. Their big advantage is that they allow walls to breathe, and in some regions mildew is a big issue, so there’s no danger of that with these products,” he said.

“The walls on which are materials are eventually hung are essentially inspection boards. With other textiles in bigger production runs there are small mistakes that can be worked with, but in what we do there’s absolutely no margin for even the smallest error. The new Montex 6500 is helping us achieve this very high quality standard,” he said.