Travertine

Travertine derives its name from a town called Tivoli, Italy, near Rome. The largest building in the world constructed largely of travertine is the Colosseum in Rome. Another notable building using travertine extensively is the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. The travertine used in the construction was imported from Tivoli.

The stone is characterised by pitted holes and troughs in its surface. Although these troughs occur naturally, they suggest to some eyes that considerable wear and tear has occurred over many years. Some installers use a grout to fill these holes, whereas others leave them open – travertine can even be purchased "filled" or "unfilled." It can be effectively polished to a smooth, shiny finish and comes in a variety of colors from grey to coral-red.

Travertine is most commonly available in tile sizes for floor and wall installations and is one of the most frequently used stones in modern architecture.

Slate

Slate, being mainly composed of quartz and muscovite, is a fine-grained, homogeneous, metamorphic rock composed of clay or volcanic ash. Slate can be made into roofing slates, also called roofing shingles, because it has two lines of breakability: cleavage and grain. This makes it possible to split slate into thin sheets.

Because of its thermal stability and chemical inertness, slate has been used for laboratory bench tops and for billiard table tops. In 18th and 19th century schools, slate was extensively used for blackboards and individual writing slates for which slate pencils were used.

Slate tiles are often used for interior and exterior flooring or wall cladding. Tiles are installed and set on mortar and grouted along the edges. Chemical sealants are often used on tiles to improve durability and appearance, increase stain resistance, reduce efflorence, and increase or reduce surface smoothness. Tiles are often sold gauged, meaning that the back surface is ground for ease
of installation.

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for your home or business call us on
01270 759006 or 07795 575868.

Granite

The word granite comes from the Latin granum, a grain, in reference to the coarse-grained structure of such a crystalline rock. It is a common and widely-occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite is nearly always massive, hard and tough, and it is for this reason it has gained widespread use as a construction stone. Granite is currently known only on Earth where it forms a major part of continental crust.

Despite being fairly common throughout the world, the areas with the most commercial granite quarries are located in the Scandinavian Peninsula (mostly in Finland and Norway), Spain (mostly in the Galicia area), Brazil, India and several countries in the South end of the African continent, namely Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Granite has been extensively used as wall and flooring tiles in public and commercial buildings and monuments. With increasing amounts of acid rain in parts of the world, granite has begun to supplant marble as a monument material, since it is much more durable. Polished granite has been a popular choice for kitchen countertops due to its high durability and aesthetic qualities. The Black granites from India are world-reknowned for their elegance.

Sandstone

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-size mineral or rock grains. Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the earth's crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any color, but the most common colors are tan, brown, yellow, red, gray and white. Since sandstone beds often form highly visible cliffs and other topographic features, certain colors of sandstone have been strongly identified with certain regions.

Some sandstones are resistant to weathering, yet are easy to work. This makes sandstone a common building and paving material. The formation of sandstone involves two principal stages. First, a layer or layers of sand accumulates as the result of sedimentation, either from water (as in a river, lake, or sea) or from air (as in a desert).). Finally, once it has accumulated, the sand becomes sandstone when it is compacted by pressure of overlying deposits and cemented by the precipitation of minerals within the pore spaces between sand grains. The most common cementing materials are silica and
calcium carbonate.