Glass-Front Showroom Floor — Seamless Microcement, Al Malqa Riyadh

A new commercial showroom in Al Malqa, Riyadh was being fitted out with a full floor-to-ceiling glass storefront facing the street and parking. The owner wanted one continuous floor with no joints and no tile lines — a single clean surface that reads as one piece the moment someone walks in past the glass. Two things made this harder than an ordinary floor. First, that glass facade means raking daylight crosses the entire floor at a low side angle for most of the day, and side light like that is unforgiving — it catches every trowel mark, ridge, and dip that normal overhead lighting would hide. Second, the space is large and open with a curved reception desk standing in the middle, so the surface had to stay perfectly even across a big area and wrap cleanly around the curved base without a visible seam. A tiled floor or a poured slab would have shown grout lines or pour joints immediately under that much daylight.

microcement flooring is the right surface here because it goes down as a continuous hand-trowelled skin with no joints — but on a floor this size, under raking glass-facade light, flatness is everything. We started in the afternoon, around 4 PM, over the prepared grey substrate. The base coats were laid across the whole open floor in one continuous pass so there would be no cold joint or stop line down the middle of the room; on a large area you have to keep a wet edge moving the entire time or the join shows, and under side light it would show badly. Around the curved reception desk we worked the microcement in by hand at the base of the curve so the floor and the desk read as one flowing surface rather than a floor butting into a separate object. Each coat was tightened and smoothed with the daylight deliberately raked across it, so we could see and kill every ridge before it set — the same low light that would expose a flaw became the tool we used to find them. Once the coats were down, the floor was sealed to a glossy reflective finish so it would catch and bounce the daylight coming through the glass. By around 11 PM the same evening the full floor was sealed and reflecting the room back.