Stonescreen is an English company run by Gary O’Connor – an architectural engineer with a background in the stone industry – with a design office in Italy.

Stonescreen cladding is a curtain walling system specially designed to be faced with natural stone. It can incorporate standard or bespoke windows and doors, shades, louvres and other elements that are required.

It is assembled in the UK using stone from all over the world. It combines stone with the energy efficiency of a high performance curtain wall, being thermally efficient with negligible air loss. It also benefits from the speed of construction of curtain walling with as much of the work as possible carried out off-site.

“We can wrap round a building very quickly,” says Gary. He says at a project in Wimbledon, where £100,000 of his cladding was used, the developer had been accustomed to five stone panels being fixed a day. Using Stonescreen, 600 panels covering 200m2 were fixed in a week.

Stonescreen is a double skin rainscreen construction. It has natural stone rainscreen cladding with a back up wall integral to the system, drained, thermally broken and back ventilated.

The curtain wall forms the inner weatherproof and insulating skin. It is formed using thermally broken extruded aluminium mullions bolted to the face of the primary structure. Composite insulation panels are fitted into the aluminium frame with gasket seals to the front and rear of the panels.

Any moisture penetrating the front seal is drained and expelled through weep holes. Horizontal extruded aluminium transoms are fitted to the mullions to which natural stone cladding panels are fixed.

A 38mm air cavity is maintained between the rear face of the stone cladding and the front face of the curtain wall composite panels to ventilate the cavity. The stone would normally be 30-40mm thick, depending on the qualities of the particular stone used and the dimensions of the panels, which could be up to 3mx3m.