The wood look that goes outdoors
A large part of this range is 20 mm outdoor paving, which is a structural piece laid dry: on sand, on gravel, or raised on pedestals over a void. A quarter of an inch of extra depth is what lets it span between supports and carry a load on its own.
Outdoors is also where the print earns its keep, because a real board exposed to weather moves, silvers and eventually gives way, and a fired body does none of that. Frontier20 porcelain is the outdoor line most of this depth belongs to.
Pool coping in a wood look
Pool copings sit in this range alongside the pavers, which is the clearest sign of what the material can do. A coping caps the edge of a pool, takes water continuously and is the piece people put their hands and feet on.
Nothing cut from a tree stays in service at a pool edge the way a fired body does, so a porcelain coping with a matching deck is how a pool surround gets to read as a boardwalk. How a pool edge is put together is set out in pool and spa paving.
Trim is half of what a series needs
Moldings are the largest product type on this page: bullnose, base, stair nose, corners and the small pieces that finish an edge, all printed to match the field tile they belong to.
That matters more on a wood look than on any other print. A board floor gets its finished edge from a real piece of shoe molding, and a tiled one has to get it from the series, or the edge is a metal profile against a wood face. The trim pieces are in porcelain moldings.
Plank lengths and the 12x48
More of this range is 12x48 than anything else, then 12x24 and 8x40, with 8x48, 24x48, 24x24, 13x24 and 10x40 in smaller numbers, plus a chevron mosaic at 17x7 3/4.
Four feet is the length that reads as a board from standing height. The eight inch widths read narrower and more traditional, the twelve inch widths read like a wide plank floor, and the 24 inch formats give up the board proportion in exchange for covering ground.
Matte, almost without exception
Matte is the finish on nearly the whole range, with small rectified, natural and glazed groups alongside it.
There is a reason there is no polished wood look. Wood has no gloss of its own beyond what a lacquer puts on it, and a reflective face on a grain print reads immediately as a picture of a board instead of a board. The matte face is doing the impersonating.
The chevron and the mosaic pieces
A small group here is supplied as mosaic sheets in a chevron, which is the wood look answer to a parquet floor: short angled pieces meeting in a point, delivered on mesh instead of laid one at a time.
Laid plank by plank a chevron is a specialist floor. On mesh the whole figure arrives as a panel, so it gets used where a panel is wanted: a border around a plain field, an inset at an entry, the wall behind a range.
Color names and what they describe
The color list is a list of woods: walnut, cognac, bark and the gray-brown ranges, alongside straight gray and beige. Those are describing the print, so a series called walnut is copying the color of walnut and not its grain figure specifically.
The practical point is that two ranges with the same color name can look quite different, because one may be copying a rift sawn board and another a rustic one with knots. The series matters more than the color name.
Rooms this material was made for
A bathroom, a laundry, a mudroom, a basement, a kitchen, a terrace and anywhere with underfloor heating. What those rooms have in common is water, heat or both, and a vitrified body has no moisture content of its own to manage.
For the effect across every material, wood look tile is the full range, luxury vinyl plank is the other board look for a wet room, and engineered hardwood is the real thing for the rooms that suit it.
