Bomanite

Bomanite is a private company headquartered in Madera, California, founded in 1970 by Brad Bowman,^[1] the creator of the Bomanite process for coloring and imprinting decorative concrete paving, Dan Sieben, a freshly-returned Peace Corps volunteer, and Frank Shallenberger, a Stanford Business School professor. Today Bomanite can be found at hotels, shopping centers and homes in almost every country of the world.

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  Brad Bowman, an artist by nature,^[2] a concrete contractor by profession and a camouflage expert in World War II, conceived “ornamented concrete” (Bowman’s phrase) in the early 1960s by creating cast-aluminum cookie cutter-like tools to impress the patterns of brick, tile and cobblestone in freshly placed concrete flatwork. He practiced and improved the idea by imprinting patterns in wet sand on the beach at the end of Ocean Avenue in Carmel, California, and soon found himself installing ornamented concrete driveways for luxury homes on the 17-Mile Drive and sidewalks in Carmel.

The company, originally headquartered in Palo Alto, California, grew rapidly by franchising established concrete contractors around the world and promoting Bomanite as a cost-effective design tool with near infinite possibilities for employment of color, pattern and texture in the creation of decorative concrete paving and flooring.

Over time new products and techniques were introduced, most of them conceived by the franchisees themselves. Various other companies have introduced competitive products, giving architects, landscape architects and builders a variety of sources for architectural paving and flooring. Indeed, a new industry—Architectural Concrete Paving—was created as the result of Brad Bowman’s invention.

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