Frontier20 copings and corners
A bonded indoor tile has no visible edge anywhere. Its perimeter is buried in grout, baseboard, a door bar or a wall. A twenty millimeter paver on a terrace shows its thickness everywhere it stops: at the lawn, at the step, at the pool rim, at the drain.
So every boundary has to be a product, and every boundary has to exist in every color. That is the arithmetic: a short list of sizes for the field, against a long list of profiles repeated across sixty odd colors. The alternative is a sawn edge showing a raw twenty millimeter section at every change of level, which is what the system is built to avoid.
Colors named after stones
The color names in this range are not invented. Indiana Buff Select and Indiana Grey Select carry both a color and a grade from the Indiana limestone trade. Bluestone Blue Select and Bluestone Full Color are the two standard sorts of bluestone: the first a consistent blue gray, the second the one that runs to brown, lilac and green. Montauk Black, Grey and White are slate names, and Travertine Cross Cut says which way the block was sawn.
These are the stones an American mason would have specified for a terrace or a set of steps, and the range is reproducing them individually rather than offering a generic limestone look. It is the difference between a tile that resembles a category and one that resembles a particular quarry's output.
Thermal and cleft bluestone colors
Two of the names begin with Thermal: Thermal Bluestone Blue Select and Thermal Bluestone Full Color. In the bluestone trade thermal means the flamed face, the one produced by taking heat to the stone, as opposed to natural cleft.
So the range is not imitating a stone. It is imitating a stone in each of the two finishes that stone is commonly sold in, and listing them as separate products. That is an unusually specific thing for a fired tile to do, and it is a good indication of who the range was drawn up for.
Frontier20 sizes
12 by 24 inches accounts for most of what is here by a wide margin. Behind it sit the long 12 by 48, then 24 by 24, 8 by 24 and 24 by 48.
The 12 by 48 stands out because it is the plank shape, and it is where the wood look products in this range live. It goes where a deck board would go and it is not a deck board: it is a ceramic slab that sits on the ground, with none of a wood deck's seasonal movement and none of its lightness either.
Matte throughout
Effectively the entire range is matte, and that is a decision rather than a gap.
Every one of the stones being referenced here is matte in life. Indiana limestone is matte. Bluestone is matte. Slate is matte. As paving, a polished version of any of them would be an odd thing to specify, and the range does not offer one.
Frontier20 drain covers
A small group of products in this range are drain gratings made in the same porcelain as the paving, in each color.
It is the component that says who the range was drawn up for. Somebody is specifying a whole terrace, including where the water goes, and would rather the floor was not interrupted by a piece of galvanised steel in the middle of it.
Grip stair treads
A run of the stair treads is listed as grip, and the naming is deliberate: the range separates the piece you step onto from the piece you walk across.
Treating a stair as a different surface from a terrace is a sensible thing for a range to do, and the manufacturer states which face a given piece carries.
Twenty millimeter porcelain paving
This is the twenty millimeter product described on the porcelain tiles page, which sets out how it differs from ordinary indoor tile and why the thickness figure is the first thing to read.
For how it sits beside quarried paving, pool copings and stacked stone, the outdoor tiles range is the wider view. Almost nothing outdoors is thin, and this range is one answer to that.
Where Frontier20 is made
The whole range comes from Landmark Ceramics, and it is made in the United States, which mainly means the factory sits on the same continent as the terrace.
The practical consequence is batch. Tile is made in runs, and pieces from one run agree with each other more closely than pieces from two. For a terrace laid in stages, raise batch when the second order goes in.
