The Tile Awards, run by The Tile Association, were back in the Midlands this year after their sojourn into London last year. Once again they emphasised the significant role played by stone in creating modern interiors, although the makers of porcelain tiles are fighting hard to recover the sector of the market that has been lost to natural stone.

Last year when we reported on the Tile Awards we said some of the entries would have felt perfectly at home in the Natural Stone Awards. This year, one of the finalists in the Tile Awards actually was entered in the Stone Awards.

The company involved is Floors of Stone, although its entry in the Stone Awards was as deVol Kitchens, which is Floors of Stone’s sister company.

In each case, it was the new 145m² showrooms created from an old mill in Loughborough, Leicestershire, that had impressed the judges, gaining Highly Commended in the Stone Awards in December and being chosen as a finalist in the Tile Awards that were presented on Saturday 18 April.

Last year the Tile Awards ceremony was held in London instead of its usual venue in Birmingham following a change of secretariat to marketing agency Smart Marketing Works. This year the Awards were back in Birmingham. They were presented at St John’s Hotel in Solihull. Smart Marketing Works says the Awards will alternate between London and the Midlands.

Floors of Stone and deVol Kitchens have a lot of limestone and travertine, marble and slate displayed in large, bright open spaces in their showrooms.

But they did not win the Excellence in Independent Retailing category that they entered. That honour went to TileStyle in Dublin, which was one of the finalists last year. In fact, all four of last year’s finalists, including the winner, Ceramic Tile Merchants, were finalists again this year, being joined in the line-up by Armatile and Floors of Stone. Paul and Rosie Bryan’s Creative Stone & Tile showroom in Omagh, Northern Ireland, was also in the line-up, but once again failed to achieve top honours.

Winner TileStyle has even more space at its disposal than Floors of Stone, but it has divided its 4,800m² into discreet boutiques. Each remains bright and open, but dividing the space up creates a sense of intimacy so that customers do not feel overwhelmed by the choice nor that they have entered a DIY ‘shed’. Each boutique has a different theme, one of them devoted entirely to natural stone.

One of the most unusual features of the showroom is the inclusion of two show homes, designed and fitted out by two of Ireland’s leading interior designers.

The amount of natural stone among the finalists of the Tile Awards emphasises how established stone now is in interiors and how popular it remains for commercial, domestic and leisure projects.

But, of course, not everything that looks like stone, or sounds like it from the name it has been given, actually is stone.

The makers of ceramic and porcelain tiles have seen a sizeable chunk of their market taken by stone and they want it back, so they are trying to create tiles that both look like stone and can be produced in the large formats that is one of the natural materials’ attractions.

And, of course, they are keen to point out that man-made tiles are thinner, lighter and do not need sealing (and occasional resealing) to keep them in pristine condition.

The Floor Tile of Year was just such a product. It is called Fusion and was entered in the Awards by Craven Dunnill & Co.

Although it won the Floor Tile of the Year Award, it is sold as both a floor and wall tile. It is made by Italian glazed porcelain producer Edimax Ceramiche, taking, it says, inspiration from a North American natural stone. The digitally printed glazed porcelain tile even incorporates elements that look like petrified wood.

It comes in three colourways – Silver, with warm grey beige tones; Ivory, with muted pale cream and highlights of beige; and Amber, which has golden tones intermingled with stronger beige and grey highlights.

Each is available in formats up to 750mm x 450mm, with a small format 150mm x 75mm brick and two sizes of mosaics, 50mm and 25mm square. They are all 10mm thick.

The Wall Tile of the Year is a significant step away from natural stone. It is Johnson Tiles’ Prismatics range, which hark back to the heyday of psychedelic design when everything man-made was new, exciting and desirable.

But it is the project categories of the Tile Awards that see stone shown off to its best advantage. Last year the stone industry dominated these categories with every finalist in the domestic category involving stone, the Brazilian slate floor of the new Birmingham Library winning the Commercial Contract Award and Szerelmey’s installation of Agglotech’s Italian terrazzo at Tate Britain the Leisure Industry category.

Stone was not so dominant in the Awards this year but still made a significant contribution, most spectacularly in the Commercial and Leisure & Hospitality categories.

The Commercial Contract winner was Shoe Heaven in London’s world famous Harrods department store. The project was entered by contractor Trainor Contracts from County Down in Northern Ireland, where David Gilmartin says 40,000 tonnes of Moleanos, Grigio D and Nero Marquina were used on the floors with silver travertine for the walls.

The installation took nearly 4,000 man hours using 31 skilled stoneworkers. Most of the stone was cut onsite inside tanks set up for the purpose to reduce the noise level and so the dust created did not spread through Harrods, the rest of which remained open while Shoe Heaven was being created.

And there was a lot of cutting for columns, archways and floors. For example, there are 150 travertine columns with crown headers and each column required 40 mitres.

The most spectacular features are the rotundas with floors made up of sections created from three pieces of marble that were made up and polished onsite. The detail is a masterclass of stone installation.

Trainor Contracts was awarded the project by shop fitter Portview, based in County Antrim. Having successfully carried out other stonework for Harrods must have helped. For Show Heaven, it completed the work in 20 weeks – that was ahead of schedule and there was zero snagging.

Another impressive stone project was the high end development of residential apartments in Bishops Bridge Road, Queensway, London. It involved retaining the façade of the old Queen’s theatre and building new retail and residential units behind it. The entry in the Tile Awards was by London contractors Stone & Ceramic for the stonework to the entrance area and 36 bathrooms in the apartments.

Carrara marble was used in the reception area and for the penthouse bathrooms in a mixture of polished, honed and sandblasted finishes. Honed statuario was used for bathroom walls while the walls to the reception area used bookmatched Silver Travertine. Stone & Ceramic also fitted Zimbabwe Black granite detailing on the exterior of the building. Elsewhere in the building it fitted Royal Mosa’s Terra Maestricht tiles.

The new restaurant floor and walls in the Great Court of the British Museum was another of the stone project finalists, with W B Simpson installing the stone.

The British Museum made the decision in November 2013 to replace the restaurant’s old flooring after a record-breaking 6.7million visitors in 2012 and even more to that point in 2013.

The project was entered in the Tile Awards by Ardex, the tiling adhesives and grouting company. Its products solved what could have been a problem.

Marc Poland, Director at W B Simpson: “When taking up the old flooring we quickly realised that the existing screed was too weak to lay the new flooring on.”

The architect consulting on the project had specified Ardex products to fix the new floor and Ardex was called back in to evaluate the problem. It provided a solution straight away and supplied its Penetrating Screed Renovation System the same day.

Ardex Penetrating Screed Renovation System is a resin designed to strengthen and restore poorly compacted and low strength screeds that do not meet the required in-situ crushing resistance.

Arditex NA and Ardex X 77 were used for fixing the new Classic Fiorito Botticino 10x10 mosaic floor. Arditex NA’s rapid setting properties and Ardex X 77’s extended open time ensured the museum’s tight time constraints were adhered to and Ardex-Flex FL Tile Grout completed the job.

As well as the floor there is Caliza Capri honed limestone from Gareth Davis on the walls and Renaissance Silver tiles for the server from Fired Earth.

Another finalist was Watches of Switzerland, which Reed Harris had already announced it was entering for the Tile Awards when the project was featured in this magazine’s January/February issue.

The three-storey outlet selling watches that can cost more than a house used a mixture of Calacatta, Pietra Essenze Grigio and Isola Coffee Bean to create the sort of ambience that people spending that kind of money on a watch expect to be treated to.

Reed Harris also entered its tiling at the Jamie Oliver Restaurant in Denman Street into the Tile Awards, but there it had used In and Out K2 porcelain pavers.

A London company familiar to the stone industry was making its debut to the Tile Awards – Diespeker.

Diespeker is well known for its stone projects and for its terrazzo. And it was a bespoke terrazzo project at Bob Bob Ricard, the Soho restaurant, that it entered in the Tile Awards.

Bob Bob Ricard wanted to open up a basement and wanted the floor to reflect the floor in the restaurant above, which is terrazzo with a unique inlaid darker geometric pattern spelling out the name Bob Bob Ricard.

The recess for the darker pattern was cut into the lighter slabs on Diespeker’s Breton NC250 CNC machine. But all the inside corners had to be squared by hand before the darker inlay could be added (also by hand). It all then had to be polished on the jenny lind before going to Bob Bob’s to be installed.

John Krause, Diespeker Managing Director, says it was an intricate and time consuming project that Diespeker had only five weeks to complete after being awarded the contract to do it. “It was tight,” says John. “But we did it.”

Before being asked to produce the floors, Diespeker had installed 800m2 of flooring, cladding and urinal fins in conglomerate marble for the toilets, again to match the toilets on the ground floor restaurant with their distinctive black, gold and beige finish.

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Sintered surfaces – Lapitec, Dekton, Neolith – are intended to be the hot new products to expand the range of materials available to stone processors.

If porcelain tile makers have increased the size of their products to compete with stone, the sintered surface makers have gone even further, producing slabs of about 3m x 1.5m, which are ideal for large, seamless kitchen islands.

Some processors have encompassed the new materials with enthusiasm, looking forward to a similar sort of boost to business that engineered quartz has provided.

But comments from processors who are using the products make it clear it is not quite as easy to make the transition from granite and quartz as it appeared it would be.

Naturally, any new material requires some getting used to. The makers have accepted that special diamond tooling is needed to cut sintered stone and they are supplying it, although the few stone processors who have waterjet cutters report that they cut sintered stone successfully as well.

The problem with using ordinary granite saws is that they can cause the edges of sintered stone to chip.

Sintered materials are hard. They are made using a lot of heat and pressure and then slabs are floated out of the process in a similar way to sheet glass.

Processors say the result is a lot of tension in the materials. Some say they have found the best way to deal with it is to cut the outside edges off before trying to process it further otherwise it can crack apart – and as these are premium priced products you do not want to be throwing too much of them away.

On the plus side, processors report that because the material is so hard it is easier to polish than engineered quartz.

Some of the makers of engineered quartz maintain that their products incorporate colour fast pigments that can be used on exteriors without losing their vibrancy. The makers of sintered products say their materials can be used anywhere stone could be used, including exteriors, because they are using natural minerals to give their materials its colours and they are not susceptible to UV light deterioration.

A question mark is raised by some processors, though, about the fixing of sintered stone used for cladding.