Tim Wilson wanted to open a showroom and he wanted it to be in Knutsford, Cheshire. NSS went along to find out why and to look at the showroom he has opened.

Walk along Knutsford high street and it is not long before you know why Tim Wilson wanted to open a new showroom of his Terzetto stone business there.

Knutsford is a quaint, olde worlde town in Cheshire – the sort of place the wealthy residents of the area like to come to shop. But that alone was not the reason why Tim Wilson wanted to open a showroom there.

The main street, where Terzetto are, is King’s Street. It is less than half a mile long, but walk along it and you pass the kitchen showrooms of Chalon, Mowlem, Plain & Simple and Smallbone of Devizes before you reach Terzetto, where you can choose the stone tiles you want to complement your new kitchen. In nearby Stanley Road is the town’s fifth kitchen showroom, the premises of The Authentic Kitchen Company. There are also two bathroom showrooms. “They like us being here,” Tim told NSS. “They send their customers along to us.”

That is a major reason Tim wanted to open in Knutsford. While other high streets now see empty premises where there used to be kitchen showrooms, Knutsford remains a magnet for up-market home improvers.

Terzetto are based in Tockwith, Yorkshire, where they have a warehouse from which they sell stone tiles and slab to the trade and other shops as well as having a showroom for retail sales themselves. But they already had a customer base on the west side of the Pennines, largely as a result of their website. Designers in Cheshire had begun to single them out as both suppliers and fixers. “It was one of those scenarios where there was already a demand for us here,” says Tim.

Knutsford was a location he had coveted for a showroom almost since he first opened in Yorkshire in 2006 and started importing stone for himself.

His motivation for the move was frustration. Having been a self-employed tiler working with his Dad, Brian, since he was 18 he had come to recognise a good stone tile when he saw it, but he found that as stone, especially travertine, became more price competitive the quality deteriorated. As the installer, he received the brunt of customer dissatisfaction, so he decided to stop accepting what was being imported by others and start shipping it in himself to control the quality of what he was getting.

“Stone is a difficult product to buy unless you know what you’re looking for,” says Tim. “Because I had installed it, I had a hands-on knowledge of it and it had got to the stage where I thought I knew more about it than the retailers I was buying from.”

Tim had moved up to Yorkshire from Oxford in pursuit of his hobby, competitive cycling – Yorkshire being the heart of the sport in the UK. He has competed in road races and five-day stage events and believes the perseverance needed when you are trying to maintain your position as you cycle up a long hill translates to the business world.

He is also dyslexic, which he used to regard as a problem but, after 40 years, is coming to see as an advantage because it gives him a view of the world that, as he says, “enables me to think out of the box.” It is a perspective that has impacted directly on both his showrooms because he designed them.

In Knutsford he has gone for a starkly minimalist approach, showing the stone and not much else – just stoves and a mirror – deliberately avoiding cluttering the space with furniture or any other distractions.

And all the tiles are stone – slate, marble, limestone, travertine and basalt – sourced from Israel, Turkey and India as well as Europe.

Tim: “I used to install porcelain and ceramics but stone looks a lot better. There’s no comparison. There really isn’t.”

His one concern about his new showroom was that it would be too small. The interior had been painted black by the previous occupiers and was dingy. Tim has opened it up and made the showroom bright and inviting. “I keep telling customers that using large tiles makes a small space look bigger and this place proves it – it looks huge.”

One of the benefits of the stoves is to enhance the fireplaces that Terzetto sell, as well as being the only heating in the new showroom. The fireplaces joined the Terzetto range as a result of Tim visiting his suppliers of Jerusalem stone in Israel. He saw a huge fireplace being made in their workshop for a film star in Beverley Hills. He said: “I want one of those only smaller.” It is now in the Knutsford showroom and can be seen in the pictures on the previous pages. It has a price tag of £4,100 but Terzetto’s suppliers will make them to the sizes required for individual customers. A smaller version is currently in production for a customer.

Next on Tim’s shopping list to add to his range are shower trays and full length panels for shower enclosures to make more of a display for the bathroom market.

Terzetto like to innovate. They were early into the market with mosaics. They could not sell them at first but now they are popular. A newly introduced finish they have for walls is what Tim calls ‘Rock Face’, a split-faced, 200x100mm, 15mm thick ‘brick’ (pictured on the previous page) that sells for £84/m2.

He says: "I’m always looking for something new. There’s a lot of companies that follow trends. I want Terzetto to be a company that brings something new to the market."