Outdoor tile thickness
Indoor floor tile clusters around three eighths of an inch. Out here the commonest thickness is an inch and a quarter, with large groups at twenty millimeters and two inches, and the thinnest paving in the collection is three quarters.
That figure is the fastest way to tell what you are looking at, because a photograph will not. A piece at three quarters of an inch or more carries its own load and can sit on sand, gravel or pedestals; a piece at three eighths has to be bonded to something solid. Two products from the same quarry, in the same color and the same size, can be either one of those things.
Paving, copings, ledger and patterns
Paving is the bulk of it, and behind that sit pool copings, ledger panels for walls, and pattern sets. The stone tiles range carries the indoor half of the same materials, where flat tile, mosaic and paving are in rough balance.
Step outside and that balance collapses. Each of the four exists because an indoor tile does not stretch to the job: carrying weight without being bonded down, finishing the edge of a pool, facing a wall in stacked stone, or arriving as a repeating arrangement of several sizes at once.
Outdoor stone finishes
Honed and polished lead most indoor stone ranges. Out here they barely register. Tumbled is the largest finish by a wide margin, then split face, then sandblasted, flamed and fine picked.
Every one of those is a texture applied on purpose. A smooth surface outdoors is wet for part of the year, and a textured face also hides what a garden puts on it between cleans. The processes are the same ones described on the stone tiles page; what changes outdoors is that they stop being a style choice and become the default.
Outdoor paving colors
Indoor tile ranges are led by white, usually by a distance. This one is not. Beige and gray are level at the top, with white third and brown, blue and multicolor blends behind them.
Outdoors a surface is surrounded by soil, planting, brick and wood rather than by painted walls and white cabinetry, and the palette follows what it sits next to. Pale colors also take up less of the sun's heat than dark ones, which is why a light beige deck is the traditional choice around a pool and a black one is not.
Travertine pool decks
Travertine is the second material in this collection and the first among the quarried ones, ahead of marble, limestone, quartzite and sandstone. Around a pool it has been the default for a very long time.
Two things put it there. The first is color, for the reason above. The second is the face. Travertine forms with voids running through it, and roughly three quarters of the travertine here carries a tumbled finish, which opens those voids up instead of closing them. The result is a surface with a texture of its own, where a polished stone presents a flat face. What travertine asks for in return is the carbonate chemistry described on the stone tiles page.
Pool copings
A coping is the piece that finishes the edge of a pool, and a large part of this collection is exactly that. The exposed side is profiled: rounded over, stepped, or cut square with an eased arris.
It is sold as its own product because the profile is the product. A coping is matched to the paving that runs up to it, which is why the ranges here carry both, and the profile names are worth getting straight before comparing two of them, since the same stone in two profiles is two different pieces.
Ledger panels for garden walls
The only vertical product in this collection is the ledger panel: strips of stone of varying thickness assembled into a panel so that a wall can be faced in stacked stone without the wall being built from it.
They turn up on garden walls, outdoor kitchen surrounds, retaining walls and chimney breasts. What they trade on is shadow, which makes them the one format in this collection where the material and the light are bought together.
20mm porcelain paving
Porcelain is the largest single material here, almost all of it in the twenty millimeter thickness made for outdoor use. The porcelain tiles page covers what that product is and how it differs from the thin indoor tile.
From this side of the fence the interesting part is what it competes with. A twenty millimeter porcelain and an inch and a quarter travertine paver occupy the same space in a garden, and the choice between them is the old one: a material specified to a figure against a material that came out of the ground.
Frost and water resistance
It is not the material category. Two pieces cut from the same kind of rock can be sold for different places, because what was done to them differs.
In a cold climate the property that decides it is what happens when a surface takes up water and then freezes. It is also where the openness that travertine is chosen for becomes a thing to check rather than a thing to want, and the two questions are answered separately. Different stones and different fired bodies behave very differently, and two pieces of the same material can differ. The stone name does not settle it; the piece does.
