A GUIDE TO USING NATURAL STONE IN YOUR SPACE
Contemplating using natural stone in your next project? Let us help you explore the benefits of using Mother Nature’s product in your space.
Natural stone has been used in the building industry for centuries. Its timeless beauty, as well as suitability in a variety of applications, make it a great choice for your space. Natural stone comes in many forms and can suit both traditional and contemporary settings. Natural stone has a place in trendy minimalist spaces as well as areas with a more classic design. It is unique and simply cannot be recreated by man-made material. Each stone has its own characteristics.
Image is a still from "Il Capo", a film by Yuri Ancarani exploring the process of extracting marble from quarries in the Italian alps.
You may have noticed that natural stone can be more expensive than its synthetic counterparts. This is typically due to to the labour, time and resources applied to extracting the stone. Demand also plays a significant factor in the cost of natural stone. For example, our beautiful Carrara stones — Statuario, Calacatta, Statuarietto, and Bianco Carrara—are in high demand, which naturally drives up their price, since only a limited quantity can be extracted from the select Italian quarries that supply these marbles.
How to choose a natural stone tile
Aside from the price, a stone tile is different from a ceramic or porcelain tile in terms of its appearance and composition. Customers should be aware of the natural variations that exist in stone. Pay particular attention to the movement, or veining, in the stone and its colour range. Some stones have linear veining like the Bianco Wood marble pictured below. Others have more random movement, like our Silver Shadow marble (see below). Some slate and marble have a wide variation of colour – for example our Multicolour Peacock slate and Calacatta Manhattan marble can vary significantly from one piece to another. We recommend you always see 3 or 4 full pieces or view a full sized slab before making a final purchase.
In our showrooms, we try to display each stone so you can see its natural movement but as it happens, there are variations from one shipment to the next, so the stone may change slightly. This is, after all, part of the beauty of natural stone; no two pieces are exactly alike, each is entirely unique.
