Porcelain, matte throughout
Every product is porcelain, and the finish column has two values in it. Nineteen in twenty are matte and the rest are anti slip, which is a texture rather than a shine.
Most ranges carry gloss somewhere, if only for the bathroom walls. This one has decided not to be in that part of the business. What it is in is the matte stone business, and the consistency is the point of it.
The stone looks
Order the effects by how many products carry them and the list reads: limestone, travertine, slate, generic stone, quartz, concrete, bluestone, wood. Marble comes last of the significant ones.
Marble look sells in quantity everywhere else in this catalog: three hundred odd products in the floor range, and the largest effect group of all in the kitchen one. Here it comes last, which is a decision rather than an oversight. What the range carries in depth instead are the pale matte stones, and limestone, slate and bluestone are all three stones with an American building history behind them.
Indoor and outdoor thickness
The thickness split is unusual for a tile maker. Most of this range is twenty millimeters, made for outdoor use, and the tile at eight and nine millimeters is the smaller part.
That is the reverse of the normal arrangement, where a manufacturer sells indoor tile and adds a thicker outdoor version of its best sellers. Here the outdoor product is the main business. The Frontier20 page covers that line, which is where the twenty millimeter products all sit.
Anti slip porcelain
Anti slip is a small category across the whole store, and more than half of it comes from this one maker.
It follows from the rest: a manufacturer whose main product is an outdoor paver has to have an answer for a surface that is wet several months a year, and a gloss house does not. What any individual piece carries is stated by the manufacturer against that product.
It is worth separating from the matte finish that covers the rest of the range. Matte describes how much light a surface returns; anti slip describes what it does to a shoe. A tile can be one without the other, and the two are stated separately against each product.
Landmark tile sizes
12 by 24 inches accounts for around half of everything here. Behind it sit the long 12 by 48, then 24 by 24, 12 by 12, 24 by 48 and the narrow 3 by 24.
A short size list is what lets a color run across an indoor tile, an outdoor paver, a coping and a riser without the range multiplying out of control. It is the same discipline as the single finish, applied to the other axis.
Frontier20 and the indoor series
Frontier20 is the outdoor line and it is the majority of the catalog on its own. Behind it sit a set of indoor series: Veneer, Mood, Trail, Vision, Essence, Infinity and Charme among them.
The indoor series are where the eight and nine millimeter tile lives, along with the mosaics, the accent pieces and the bases. They follow the same rules as the outdoor line, which is why an indoor floor and an outdoor terrace from this maker can be specified to look continuous.
Trim and moldings
Moldings outnumber field tile by a wide margin here, and that is entirely a consequence of the outdoor half, for the reason the Frontier20 page opens with.
So the item count is misleading if you read it as a measure of choice. The color list is the number that matters, and it is much shorter than the item count suggests.
The practical reading is that a color list this short is the thing to work from. Two colors and a handful of profiles cover most of a terrace; the item count behind them is the system carrying those colors to every edge.
American manufacture
The whole range is made in the United States, and the factory is the same one behind every series here.
The rest of what follows from it is covered on the Frontier20 page, where the outdoor line and the question of ordering in stages are both set out.
Porcelain and outdoor tile
For porcelain generally, including the makers that do sell gloss and marble looks, the porcelain tiles page is the wider view.
For the outdoor half beside quarried paving, copings and stacked stone, the outdoor tiles range sets out what a garden surface has to be, and where a fired body sits among the quarried ones.
