Natural stone tile finishes
Honed and polished lead here, as they do in slabs. What comes next is where quarried stone stops resembling anything a kiln does. Tumbled stone has been rumbled with abrasive until its edges round and its surface softens, which produces the aged look people go to travertine for.
Split face is stone broken along its natural planes instead of sawn, so the surface is irregular and the piece is thicker in some places than others. Sandblasting opens the texture with abrasive, and flaming does it with heat, which only the harder silicate stones will take, so flamed surfaces belong to granite and never to marble. All of these are processes applied to real rock, and a print cannot reproduce the result because the result has depth.
Pavers, ledger panels and copings
Flat tiles and mosaics are only part of this collection. Alongside them sit pavers made to carry weight, ledger panels for stacked stone walls, pool copings shaped for the edge of a pool, medallions and waterjet patterns.
Each is a different product with a different job, and several of them exist only in stone. Ledger panels in particular are built out of the irregularity of the pieces themselves. A fired version of the format exists and works by giving one molded face the appearance of many; the stone version gets there by actually being many.
Stone tile materials
Marble leads, with travertine behind it and smaller groups of quartzite, limestone, slate and sandstone. They are not interchangeable and the differences are chemical as much as visual.
Marble, travertine and limestone are carbonate stones that react to acids, which the marble page sets out in full. Slate and sandstone are different rocks with different behavior, and quartzite is the hardest of the group. Choosing by appearance alone is how a stone ends up somewhere its chemistry does not suit.
Thickness, and what it tells you
Most of the flat tile here sits around three eighths of an inch. A second large group runs to an inch and a quarter and beyond, which is a different product: those are pavers, made to take weight.
The thickness figure is therefore the quickest way to tell a floor tile from a paver when two products look identical in a photograph. It is the first figure to read, because everything else about the two products can agree.
Stone tile sizes
The common formats here are 12 by 24 and 12 by 12, then 16 by 24, 6 by 12 and 24 by 24. The volume stops at around two feet square, where in porcelain it carries on to 24 by 48 and beyond.
That ceiling is the block talking. A very large stone tile is heavy, more likely to carry a flaw somewhere in its face, and cut from a piece of rock that yields only so many of them. A pressed tile has none of those limits, which is why the outsized formats are a porcelain habit and the stone sizes stay where the quarry allows.
Variation between pieces
Two pieces of the same stone are not the same, and across a floor that is what people are buying. The range publishes a variation indication for many products, and stone sits at the high end of it by nature.
So a sample answers a narrow question. It identifies the stone. With a heavily veined marble, identifying the stone still leaves the floor an open question, and that gap is what a sample cannot close.
Stone mosaic
A large group here is mosaic: small pieces of stone mounted on a mesh backing so a sheet can be handled as one unit. Hexagons, basketweave, herringbone, chevron and simple squares all appear.
It is also where a marble that would be extravagant across a floor becomes possible as a shower niche or a narrow strip, and where the finish vocabulary of stone gets used at its smallest scale. The mosaic page covers how the format is made and what the sheet sizes mean.
Quarried stone against printed tile
Depth, mostly. Light enters the surface of a polished marble and comes back from slightly below it, and the veins carry through the body of the piece instead of stopping at the face.
That is the property no print reproduces, and it is the reason people pay for the quarried version when a convincing imitation exists. The porcelain tiles page covers the other side of that decision, which is the fired alternative and a different set of trade offs.
Stone tile outdoors
Flamed, sandblasted, split face and tumbled surfaces all turn up outdoors, and a large part of this collection is made for nowhere else. Stone has paved streets and courtyards for as long as there have been either.
What differs outdoors is water and frost rather than wear: a stone that holds water and then freezes behaves differently from one that does not. That is a property of the specific stone, and the outdoor tiles range covers the paving, copings and wall panels that the outdoor side of this catalog is actually made of.
