Concept: Modular Floor Tiles Based on the Iconic Carpet in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

MARCH 14, 2012

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is dense with grids, mazes, mirror images, and other rigid visual and conceptual geometries. A prominent example is the intensely colored hallway carpet that Danny zooms over in his Big Wheel in several key scenes, including the one in which he first encounters the scary goings-on in Room 237. The carpet pattern is fundamentally a grid. If you look closely in some scenes, you can even see the edges where the long rolls of carpet meet. 

Other people have been fascinated by the carpet’s grid-based design. As I discovered with a little googling, for example, the Belgian web designer Veerle Pieters used the Shining carpet pattern as the basis for an Illustrator tutorial a few years ago. 

Those of you who frequent interior design stores will know there’s a company called Flor that makes modular carpet tiles. The tiles are 19.7" square and generally cost $10–$20 each. They’re sold at places like CB2 and are popular as a floor covering in homes and offices:

So here’s my concept: I want Flor, or some other company, to manufacture a special edition of modular carpet tiles based on the Shining carpet. 

A single tile would look like this:

Two would look like this:

Four would look like this:

And sixteen would look like this:

I would totally spend enough money to cover the floor of my home office with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Carpet Tiles™. 

To match the scale and proportions of the carpet in the film, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Carpet Tiles™ would have to be roughly three feet wide by four feet tall, assuming that Danny Lloyd, the young actor who played Danny Torrance, was about four feet tall at the time. If the individual tiles were too small, it would ruin the effect. Verisimilitude is key here. It would also be important to use a low pile for the tiles; this artist used a messy pile for a Shining carpet installation, and it ruined the effect. 

On the other hand, these Shining carpet socks are pretty rad. But they don’t seem to be available anymore.