How the chip pattern is made
A mosaic tessera shows the face it was cut with and sits in a grout joint. A terrazzo chip shows neither: the chips go into the mix at whatever angle they land, the cured slab is ground down afterwards, and what reaches the surface is a section through each one with cement ground flush around it.
That is why a terrazzo chip has a hard, exact edge and nothing framing it, and why no two chip outlines repeat. A print can copy the scatter, the color and the scale. It cannot copy the section, because a print has no depth to cut into.
Telling a cast tile from a print
Look at the chip edges first, and close up. On a cast tile each edge is a cut through a piece of stone, so it is crisp, slightly irregular and never the same shape twice. On a printed face the edges are ink, so they are softer and the shapes come round again across a floor.
Thickness is a second clue and a weaker one than it looks. A cast cement tile has to be thick enough to survive casting, curing and grinding, and the pieces here sit around three quarters of an inch. A fired tile of the same pattern is usually about half that, though an outdoor porcelain paver is deliberately thick for structural reasons and breaks the rule. The terrazzo look porcelain range is the printed side, and both are legitimate products.
What goes into the binder
The aggregate is the interesting half: marble chip for the most part, with granite, quartz and glass turning up in the blends. The binder is cement, which is what makes this a cast product instead of a fired one.
A pigment in the cement sets the background and the aggregate supplies everything happening on top of it. That is the entire color system, which is why a terrazzo reads as a field with something scattered through it where a stone reads as a figure.
Venetian offcuts, and the name
The technique came out of fifteenth century Venice, where mosaic workers had marble offcuts and nowhere to put them. Chips in a lime bed, ground flat, on a terrace floor: the Italian word for a terrace is where the name comes from.
The origin was domestic, which is worth knowing because terrazzo is usually introduced as an institutional material. It reached schools, banks and airports centuries later, and it went back to houses again in the last decade.
The cement binder and what it means
A cement binder is absorbent where a vitrified porcelain body is not, and that is the practical difference between the two products. Modern poured terrazzo is sometimes bound in epoxy instead, which behaves differently again; the tiles on this page are the cement kind.
So this is a surface finished and protected as part of the installation, the way a cement or a natural stone floor is, where a glazed tile arrives with its protection already fired on. That is a difference of category and it applies to every cast and every quarried product in this catalog.
Small squares and one large one
The 8x8 is the traditional terrazzo tile size and it suits the pattern, because a small piece lets the chip distribution read as a texture across a floor, where a large one presents a single arrangement.
At the other end sits a 23 5/8 inch square, which is a metric size written in inches. Those conversions are a clue about where a cast tile was made, and they are the reason the figures on this page arrive as odd fractions.
Where terrazzo goes
A floor in an entry, a kitchen or a bathroom, and a wall where the pattern is going to be read at close range. It is a hard-wearing surface with one of the longer records in flooring behind it, and it left residential work for a generation on fashion alone.
For the same pattern on a fired body, terrazzo look porcelain is the other range. For the other cast products in this catalog, cement tile is the neighboring one.
