Porcelain that looks like natural stone
Almost everything on this page is porcelain, and almost all of it is matte. Those two facts are the whole technique. A fired body carries the color, a printed layer carries the figure, and a matte surface keeps the light from giving the print away.
What a stone look tile imitates is not a polished slab. It is the quiet end of stone: a honed limestone, a sandblasted travertine, a split slate, a weathered flagstone. Those faces carry texture and tone where marble carries veining, and texture and tone are the parts a printer can reproduce honestly.
Where it belongs and where the stone does
These two answer different jobs and both are on this site for a reason. Natural stone is the material where the depth goes all the way in, where a block came out of one place and every piece carries it, and where a floor can be refinished decades later. That is why the marble, limestone and travertine ranges are as large as they are.
Stone look porcelain answers the situations stone finds awkward: a commercial floor with a wear specification, a wet room where an acidic product will meet the surface weekly, or a 24x48 format no quarry saws. It is a different tool for a different job.
What makes a print convincing
It comes down to two things, and both are visible in a sample box, where no spec sheet carries them. The first is how many different faces a series was printed with: lay four or five pieces out together and a short print list shows up immediately as the same stone twice. The second is whether the texture under the print follows the print, which a hand tells you faster than an eye, because a shadow in the image should have a dip in the surface beneath it.
Series are where that lives. Infinity runs deepest here, with Journey, Milestone and Veneer behind it, and a series is the unit a maker invests that work in. Two tiles with the same color name from different series are not the same product.
Matte, glazed and anti-slip
Almost all of this range is matte, and matte here describes the light and not the construction: these are glazed tiles whose glaze has no shine in it. The pieces listed as glazed are the ones where the shine is the point, the decorative and subway formats, and nobody is meant to mistake those for stone.
A small anti-slip group is made with a worked surface for wet and outdoor use. Those are the pieces where the texture is doing a job beyond appearance, and they carry it in their name.
Formats from 12x24 to 24x48
12x24 leads, then 24x24, then 12x12, with a real group at 24x48. The large end is the part stone cannot follow: a 24x48 piece of limestone would be heavy, fragile and expensive to saw, and in porcelain it is an ordinary product.
Below the field sizes sit the pieces that finish a job: bullnose bases at 3x24, accent and brick formats at 4x24 and 4x12, and mosaic sheets in the same faces. A series that carries its own trim is a series that can finish a room without a change of material.
Nine millimeters against twenty
Two thicknesses split this range by where the tile goes. The 9 mm group is the interior tile, which is the ordinary thickness for a large-format porcelain. The 20 mm group is a little over twice that, and it is a paver.
The extra thickness buys breaking strength, and that is what lets a 20 mm porcelain be laid loose on gravel or grass or raised on pedestals over a roof, where it is supported only at its corners. An interior tile bonded to a floor never has to span anything and is not made to. The Frontier20 range covers those, and several faces on this page exist in both thicknesses, so a floor can run from a kitchen out onto a terrace without changing its appearance.
Stone look color names
The color list here reads differently from the rest of the catalog: Absolute, Desert, Cosmos, Sky, Earth, Natural Ivory. Those are not stone names because there is no quarry behind them, and a maker naming an invented surface reaches for a landscape instead.
In practice it means a sample matters more than a name here, since nothing in a word like Cosmos tells you whether the tile is warm or cool. Most of this range is sampled, which is the usual way round that.
Stone look on walls and showers
Backsplash is the single most common published use on this page, ahead of interior floors, and shower walls come third. That distribution says something true about the material: a stone look surface earns the most where a real stone would be asked to sit somewhere it dislikes.
A shower wall is the clearest case. The shower tile range separates walls from pans, and the pieces published for a pan here are the textured ones.
Other looks in the same material
The same printing that makes stone look porcelain makes the rest of the look family. Wood look tile is the largest of them, and limestone look is the narrower version of this page aimed at one stone.
For the material itself and not the effect it wears, the porcelain tile range holds everything fired to this body, printed or plain.
