Since Eleanor Coade introduced Coade Stone in 1770 people have been trying to copy the natural attraction of stone. Engineered quartz has expanded the stone processor’s palette, mostly in kitchen worktops, and now a new generation of sintered products promises even more, while coming up is large-scale 3D printed ‘stone’. Even Coade Stone is enjoying a revival. Here, NSS reviews the latest developments and trends in natural and engineered stone.
There seems to be alchemy involved in Man’s attempts to reproduce stone. Whether it is terrazzo (probably the oldest form of engineered stone), Coade Stone, quartz, the latest sintered products or 3D printing (the newest form of engineered stone), the makers like to keep their secrets.
An analogy with the philosopher’s stone is apt. An aim of the philosopher’s stone is to turn base metal into gold. Makers of engineered stone want to process base materials into gold… or at least profits.
Some of the materials produced have undoubtedly been good to the stone industry. Engineered quartz has expanded the worktop market for stone companies and most processors now find it accounts for a significant proportion of their business, if not the majority of it.
New colours, patterns and finishes are being developed constantly and the materials are being promoted beyond kitchen worktops and bathroom vanity units into other rooms for use on any vertical and horizontal surface, inside and out.
And ‘inside and out’ is becoming increasingly important, both for engineered and natural stone.
Paul Owen of Trade Price Stone in Hilton, Derbyshire, says: “The single biggest change we’ve seen is the change in sizes that are being used. What was the stock 300x300mm has now turned into a 900 x 600mm standard. The larger format ‘bleeds’ outdoors from slate or limestone tiles to an exactly matching paver in the same material.”
Trade Price Stone sells only natural stone. “We have seen a significant increase in limestone sales over the past year,” says Paul. “Limestone pavers have been VERY successful.
“Changes in adhesive technologies have also changed the landscape. What was a stock 20mm thickness for floors is now a much more manageable 15mm. It’s been a long time since this industry has seen so much development in grouts, sealers adhesives and cleaning chemicals. Long may that continue as well because it makes the industry much more ecologically aware and the end user gets a much better experience from stone.”
And while stone for interiors is getting thinner, outside it is getting thicker. Paul: “Investment in packing and shipping techniques mean that 30mm and even 50mm thickness are the norm, giving a much more hardy standard. We sell fireplace hearths at 30-50mm thickness and because they are so consistent we have customers using these pieces not only as hearths but also as blanks, coping, window cills. Even stonemasons have used them for masonry because of their flawless attributes.”
The increasingly stringent thermal barrier requirements of Part L of the Building Regulations pose some design challenges for the infinity concept with its seamless transition from interiors to exteriors, but as there has to be a barrier of some kind (normally a glass wall or doors) between the outside and the inside, there is an opportunity to introduce insulation between the two environments.
The makers of quartz have tried to promote their materials for use inside and out with some success in warmer climates, especially as versions that look more authentically like marble have been perfected, although not many designers or clients in the UK have so far used quartz outside.
Perhaps the new generation of sintered products will be more successful.
These are stronger and more dense (so even less water permeable) than quartz. The big players in the market with this material are Cosentino, the Spanish company that makes the market leading Silestone quartz, and Breton, the Italian company that developed the plant for making quartz that it has sold in many countries and which has been copied in others. It is not currently proposing to sell plant to make sintered stone to other companies. Cosentino’s sintered material is called Dekton and Breton’s Lapitec.
The manufacturing process is not at all similar to making quartz. Quartz products are made by mixing quartz in a matrix of resin. Sintering uses pressure and heat to combine powders into solids – a process, the manufacturers like to point out, that is precisely the way nature makes natural stone. And because there is no resin bonding, the manufacturers feel justified in describing the product as ‘natural’, an epithet many of the makers of stone’s pretenders like to apply to their products.
Neither company likes its products to be compared to the other’s, or other products on the market, but before Dekton and Lapitec were launched, London wholesaler MGLW had introduced Neolith from a company called The Size. MGLW introduced it as a ceramic material but The Size describes it as a “100% natural sintered compact surface”. It can be seen in London on the walls and floors of Bank underground station.
Rogerio Moutinho, who heads MGLW in London, says Neolith has yet to make the impact in the UK that it has made in Germany and France, although it can now be seen in some up-market kitchen showrooms. “You need to get the clients ordering it,” says Rogerio.
All the sintered products require special tools to work and Rogerio admits there has been some reluctance by processors to encompass the new material so far. “It’s difficult to break down the barrier.”
Rogerio says the most discerning end of the market is buying more marble, even for kitchen worktops, where they either accept that it is less resilient than granite or simply don’t care.
It is a trend not lost on the quartz manufacturers, many of which are now selling ranges that incorporate a marbling effect, including some of the Compac quartz range that MGLW sells.
Rogerio says that when clients are looking for materials to refurbish their existing premises in London they tend to take their time and are usually looking for natural materials. And with London attracting rich people from all of the world who want to live there, tastes can be diverse and expensive, which has been advantageous to the stone industry in the capital.
Developers are not so discerning, especially when they want hundreds of worktops, vanity units or wall linings. They can look at a small sample of quartz and know that is what it will all look like. The attraction of stone for the individual looking to make a statement, of course, is precisely that each block of stone is unique.
Rogerio:"I feel stone and stone products are as popular as ever. We are being chased in a big way by ceramic people but stone will remain an important material for decoration."
He, like other major wholesalers, believes that CE marking is helping to raise the perceived professionalism of the stone sector and providing confidence about the materials to a clientele that is increasingly not buying stone for the first time and is more knowledgeable about what it wants.
Pisani, with depots near London’s Heathrow Airport and Matlock, Derbyshire, takes the same view. Pisani sells Hanstone quartz but does not claim to compete head on with the major suppliers. Costas Sakellarios, the Managing Director, says: “We have our product and we are competitive but we take a small part of the cake. Our focus is on other products. There are several tiers in the market. People on their second or third house will use stone because it adds value, in a similar way that a swimming pool adds value.”
He does not believe engineered stone is likely to replace stone in the £150,000 kitchen but he can see it taking market share from solid surfaces and melamine-faced wood-based products. “There’s space for all of us,” he says.
Pisani is not currently selling sintered products. Costas says wholesalers have to follow trends and supply what people want to buy. “It’s difficult to explain to our sales people what it is and why our customers should use it. It needs very specialised promotion. It’s difficult for anyone other than the actual producer to market it.”
Cosentino sells its products through its own five centres in the UK. Breton does not have its own distribution network for Lapitec and has introduced it through Stephen Pike’s Marble & Granite Centre in Rickmansworth, near the M25, making it ideally situated to supply into London and the rest of the country with its easy access to the motorway network.
The latest Lapitec colour was unveiled at an open day to mark the Marble & Granite Centre’s 20th anniversary in June. Michele Ballarin, Lapitec’s Director of Sales & Marketing, was there and joined Stephen Pike in presenting Approved Processor certificates to the first customers to have completed training in the use of the new material.
When engineered quartz was first introduced its distribution was also restricted to approved installers who had been through training to help them understand the product and how to use it. The reason is straightforward enough: if the first people to buy it have an unhappy experience the product will get a bad reputation because people tend to blame products when they get problems rather than the installers.
When Breton developed the machinery for making quartz, it restricted the supply to one producer in a region and for a long time all quartz was produced on Breton plant and brands were developed.
Now low price quartz, mostly from the Far East, is produced on machinery that is not always from Breton. It is attacking the strength of the brands and starting to turn quartz into a commodity, with customers perceiving little difference between one make and another.
Breton wants to avoid that with Lapitec, which is why it is producing the product itself and keeping its processes secret.
The Size and Cosentino also offer sintered products, and at least one Chinese company, Emin Microcrystalline, is already adding its emails for a sintered product to the ubiquitous Chinese onslaught of inboxes everywhere. But Lapitec’s Michele is dismissive. He describes the products from these companies as “complementary” or simply “different” to Lapitec.
In quartz, competition is driving down prices and has led to own-brands such as International Stone’s IQ Quartz and Beltrami’s B-Quartz. But quartz will never become a true commodity because of all the different colours and finishes it can be given. And the manufacturers are still innovating in an effort to offer unique products and distinguish their brands.
Some of the latest developments come from Stone Italiana, sold in the UK by London stone wholesaler Stone World. One is Jaipur, a collection in earthy and spicy colour tones, characterized by textural variations that make each slab unique through a production method developed by Stone Italiana itself. Another is KStone, a collection of countertops in 13 different shades, all NSF 51 and Greenguard certified and available in slabs measuring 305 × 140cm and 13mm, 20mm and 30mm thick.
And if you are looking for environmental friendly, it will be difficult to beat DNA Urbano, made from street sweeping debris supplied to Stone Italiana by CEM Ambiente Spa, a company that collects waste in 49 municipalities in Lombardy in the north of Italy.
There are still more quartz brands coming on to the market. One of the latest is Kalingastone, introduced by Nile Trading UK, stone wholesalers in Cheshunt, Essex, in January last year, just in time to launch the brand to a wide audience at the Natural Stone Show at ExCeL London three months later.
Kalingastone comes from a state-of-the-art factory in India, certified to ISO 9001: 2008, that has its own fully fledged R&D facilities. Neel Shah of Nile Trading says: “Since the introduction of Kalingastone we have seen the acceptance of this brand grow tremendously due its superior quality and competitive pricing against other well known brands. In the past 18 months we have had extremely good reviews from our customers, putting its quality at par with leading brands in the UK.”
Nile Trading holds large stocks of all its ranges in the UK and delivers anywhere in the country.
Another relatively new brand is Radianz, introduced by the huge Korean multinational Samsung, maker of so many well-known consumer products, in 2010.
Although it was late into the market, Samsung has worked steadily, if undramatically, with its suppliers that include one of the country’s longest established stone wholesalers, Gerald Culliford, in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey.
Radianz is not produced on Breton machinery, which Samsung promotes as a strength that enables it to manufacture to its own exacting specifications. “Fabricators’ feedback is that it is good to work with,” says Oliver Webb at Gerald Culliford Ltd.
“The colour pallet is a little different to the more European colours that many of the brands closer to our shores produce, so the range gives customers something a little different to play with in their designs – all this along with a well-priced product.
“The initial two years were hard work, but since mid-last year sales have really powered ahead. We have been surprised by the demand and it is becoming a great success and addition to our product offering.
“For more than 40 years we have prided ourselves in looking for the best products. At our heart, we have always been about selling quality natural stone, but this quality focus now extends into the other products we provide and we are selling nearly as much quartz as granite. With our strength in marble seeing us well through the tougher years of the recession we believe we have a very strong range of products going forward.”
But, as we said at the beginning of this report, quartz and sintered materials are not the only challengers to natural stone. Terrazzo, which is basically natural stone chippings embedded in a matrix of cement, has been around since the Romans and is still often the flooring of choice in high traffic areas such as supermarkets and hospitals.
Now there are two new competitors for this sector of the market. One of them is stone wholesaler Beltrami, which has entered the market with a product called Stonite, and the other is an Italian company called Agglotech, which has established a UK office with Nigel Dunnett.
Agglotech has already completed a spectacular flooring project at Tate Britain in London that was featured in Natural Stone Specialist in May when it won a Tile Award for the ‘Best use of a tile within the leisure or hospitality industry’. Since then it has also won a 2014 RIBA Award and the 2014 RIBA English Heritage Award for Sustaining the Historic Environment.
There could hardly have been a better showcase for Agglotech’s move into the UK and we will feature the project in more detail in a future edition of NSS.
Another traditional challenger to natural stone is Coade Stone – and like the more modern products it has also been shrouded in mystery since Eleanor Coade introduced it in 1770. It was a success not least because it brought fine art statuary into the price bracket of a much larger audience than could not afford original works in natural stone. Eleanor Coade employed some of the top sculptors of her age to produce original works for her company, from which casts were taken and replicas produced.
Coade Stone is a fired clay product, many examples of which have survived better than the stone of the buildings they were added to. But they do weather and get damaged and there are companies now repairing and reproducing Coade Stone work, as well as making new Coade Stone statues.
When Eleanor Coade died her secret was passed on for a while but eventually the material went out of fashion and the recipe was lost. But, by a mixture of trial and error and scientific analysis, it has been rediscovered and now a number of companies offer Coade Stone again and it is coming back into fashion.
One of the companies producing Coade Stone is Thomason Cudworth, run by Philip Thomason in Cudworth, Somerset, who rediscovered the Coade Stone secret 30 years ago and has made a living from it since then. He has now been commissioned by the Landmark Trust to repair and reproduce the Coade Stone on the home of Eleanor Coade herself. Again, more about that in a future edition of Natural Stone Specialist.
On the horizon is the completely new technology of 3D printing. It is being produced by a company called D-Shape UK using Voxeljet printers 4m x 4m x 2m that are currently housed in Germany (the home of 3D printer company Voxeljet).
Sam Welham, an architect, has established a company called D-Shape UK to develop 3D printing of architectural elements for building.
He says the medium used for the printing creates ‘stone’ in much the same way as sedimentary stone is produced – although he does not like to talk too much about the materials and processes involved.
The product is laid down in 10-30mm layers to build up almost any shape within the limits of the movement that can be achieved by the printer head.
Sam says Voxeljet’s large-format printers are currently the best option for producing detailed and ornamental architectural elements, although the process is currently experimental and cannot print to a high enough resolution nor quickly enough to be competitive in most applications. Still, the next generation of the printer is already on its way. It has a higher resolution, is faster and produces a less expensive product.
Sam says the process is ecologically sound and is currently being used to repair coral reefs in Bahrain, which it can do because the coral can grow on the material. It has also been already been used to produce a shop display in London.