Concrete Innovations by Hallack
Turlock, California
by David Thompson

Julio A. Hallack drives his wife crazy when he travels, because he always seems to have his head down. No, he’s not embarrassed to be seen with her. He’s just studying the floors.

As the owner of Concrete Innovations by Hallack, a small company that specializes in restoring concrete floors, he is a dedicated student of what’s underfoot.

“My wife says I have a problem because I’m always staring at the floor,” says Hallack. “But that helps me make decisions on what I think is going to look good because I’ve already seen it done by other professionals in the industry.”

Based in the California farming community of Turlock, Hallack was one of the first contractors in the state’s vast Central Valley to do decorative concrete work. It wasn’t the easiest sell back in 1991, when he got started, but Hallack loved it and stuck with it.

“I was like the Lone Ranger pushing a product that many people had a hard time buying,” he says. “And the ones who were buying it were bringing in contractors from out of the area with big portfolios.”

Hallack’s perseverance paid off as decorative concrete began to catch on through the 1990s. Now he travels throughout the Central Valley, working on jobs that have included rehabilitating the floors in a California supermarket chain (using acid stains), recreating the labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral (a gothic, paved stone floor that he reproduced in concrete on a private estate), and restoring a 1934 terrazzo floor in an old art deco movie theater (part of the larger renovation of the State Theater in Modesto, California).

About 80 percent of his business is floor restoration, though he also creates new floors and concrete countertops. Chemical staining is one of the main tools in his bag of tricks, along with overlays and stamping materials. He’s a real fan of his two primary product manufacturers: L.M. Scofield Co. and Miracote.

Designing the job
Before starting a project, Hallack insists on involving his clients in developing a design, even when they’d prefer to leave it entirely up to him.

“I think the client should always be involved, because they become more appreciative at the end of the project,” he says. “And it takes the weight off of me.”

In developing a design, Hallack shows his clients lots of photographs, both from his portfolio and from magazines. He also encourages them visit his warehouse, which doubles as a showroom with 7,000 square feet of both indoor and outdoor decorative concrete on display.

Hallack believes that colors should be chosen with careful regard for their surroundings.

“A big mistake of architectural concrete is when the outside colors don’t match the inside, or when the outside colors don’t match the stucco of the house or the eaves or the roof,” he says.

If a residence already has slate floors indoors, for instance, Hallack might draw from the slate’s palette of blues, greens and terra cottas for the patio’s color scheme. Lighter shades might be appropriate to reduce heat retention outdoors, but the indoor and the outdoor surfaces will still tie together, he says.

Likewise, if the house has a red roof, Hallack might broadcast some red dry-shake color onto the concrete to tie the new floor in with the roof. “Paying attention to detail like that is one of the ways that I try to be different from my competitors,” he says.

You can see Hallack’s attention to detail in the hand-engraved designs he’s known for. “I started doing sandblasting in the early 90s when everybody was hot for sandblasting, but I thought it looked kind of boring and I didn’t like the mess,” he says. “So I started doing my own engraving by hand.”

He uses a Makita grinder for the bold lines, and specialty tools for fine details such eyes, leaves and feathers. He typically acid stains individual sections of the engraving with various colors and then fills the borders with colored tile grout.
Hallack helped remodel the Central Valley’s chain of homegrown grocery stores, Save Mart Supermarkets and S-Mart Food, redoing the floors and hand-engraving welcome messages at the entrances, with designs customized for each store.

When he restored the concrete floor in the lobby of a local beverage distributor, he capped off the job with a hand engraving of the Anheuser-Busch eagle logo — an eight-foot by eight-foot screaming bird set atop the letter ‘A.’ “It’s one of my masterpieces,” he says.