Marble Floors Can Set The Tone Of A Property, But Constant Care Needed

NATIONAL REPORT— A lobby floor is the first thing that a guest sees upon entering a hotel, and well-maintained marble can be one of the most attractive choices. However, proper care for a marble floor is no easy task, involving constant cleaning, regular polishing, and occasional cutting, or honing, which uses a diamond to grind away the top layer of marble surfaces so as to remove scratches. And daily cleaning is the most important thing, according to Eric Wood, director/housekeeping at the Essex House, a Westin Hotel in New York. “To keep marble looking good for a long time, it needs to be kept very clean. Marble floors can get scratched by debris, which can be ground in by people who are walking on the marble. The cleaner you keep it, the longer the marble will look nice before it has to be cut. The most important thing is constant dust-mopping each day,” Wood said. Cleaning is nothing new to hotel-iers. But because the other elements of marble care— polishing and honing— require training and specialized equipment, many hotels consider outsourcing these tasks. Therese Riehle, GM at the Courtyard Newark Airport/Elizabeth Hotel in Elizabeth, NJ, has found that both outsourcing this work and having it done in-house can have merits. “I’ve done it both ways. In other properties, I’ve had a full staff that would polish and hone as well. If you do it like that, you’re investing a great deal in your employees in terms of training,” Riehle said. “As long as your turnover is low, it’s probably the way to go. But if turnover is an issue, and you don’t have the capital to purchase the equipment, than outsourcing it is a good option,” she said. Currently the hotel, which opened in July 2002, is doing everything in house. “We polish sections every week. We rotate every night the area we work on, so each week we do a section once. For the polishing, we use a high-speed burnisher. We’ve actually been borrowing one from one of our sister properties for now, and we’ll make that investment in the future,” Riehle said. But, she added, “When it comes to honing, we’ll almost definitely outsource it and bid it out.” However, the honing will not be part of monthly maintenance. At this property, Riehle said it will need to be done only “once a year or every six months or so, depending on the traffic.” She estimated the annual cost of this outsourced honing for a medium-sized hotel lobby of 12,000 square feet at “anywhere from $2,000 on up.” According to the manager at a Boston-area Courtyard by Marriott, the question of whether or not to outsource the honing is mostly a question of staff. When the hotel has someone experienced with marble, it makes sense to do even the honing in-house, the manager said. The honing can be done with the same machine used for polishing, he explained, with the additional use of a stripping compound. But that might not be such a good idea, cautioned Ed Williams, owner of MarbleLife, a stone maintenance company that has franchisees around the country. “People can do it,” he said, “but we find that most people get in trouble. There’s a lot of things that can happen like window-framing around the edges of the tile, or it can begin to look like a roller coaster around the edges when people go too deep. A lot of people just watch a video and say, ‘we can do this ourselves,’ but it’s a lot more complicated than that.” “This isn’t something you can teach someone in four hours how to do,” said Joseph Smith, owner of MarbleLife of Delaware Valley. “This is a trade. You’re not doing the same thing every time, but evaluating it. It could be different types of diamond or different types of polish.” MarbleLife franchisees are often called upon by small or medium-sized hotels to do monthly or even weekly maintenance, including both polishing and honing. The annual cost for monthly polishing, along with honing as needed, for a 15,000-square-foot hotel lobby might range from $6,000 to $12,000 per year, Smith said. But mont