Author: Siddharth Soni

The other day I visited an acquaintance’s house. In their drawing room, I noticed a wall fully covered with shiny glossy marble. Looked Italian to me. I guess it wasn’t back-lit, may be in the evenings it could be.

In my conversations with Dad, I often remark, “It has become a fashion market” and its variations.

Even as I write, I am meditating on the meaning of ‘It’ in the above remark.

What is ‘It’?

It = The entire category of Stone Industry?

That doesn’t sound and feel right. And yet, house-design does follow certain styles, fads and fashion, and making choices related to stone is a part of the designing process. So it may not be wrong to call it fashion.

Typically fashion has been linked to garments and clothing. In which other areas, do we see ‘fashion’? Cars? Automobiles in general. Furniture design, typically sofas and beds. I see that in ceiling-design too.

Coming back to stone, well it can’t be fashion. Stone, unless crushed, has a timeless sort of, almost an unchanging presence and look.

Think about it. Garments, one changes almost every day or every other day; some folks do have an unchanging look and they have multiples of the same garments to keep that unchanging look.

You can’t change stone. I mean, theoretically you can but in terms of possibilities and probabilities, you don’t. Stone changes its hues ever so slowly, but that’s that. Nothing radical.

And yet, since stone (I include marble and granite also in stone for the purpose of this post) appears in different colors, it does lend itself to some sort of fashion.

At some point, white marble was a craze. Some time back grey granite and stone was in greater demand. For a couple of years and continuing, brown granite and stone looks to be more popular.

Just as a wardrobe tends towards a palette, colors in the house would tend towards a palette too if you observe and make notes carefully. It would be worthwhile to think in terms of color palettes for your house or interior design and then look at colors of individual elements like sofa color, wall color, floor color et al.

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What should be the size of the stone you use for floors or for walls?

Answer: It depends on the surface area of the floors or walls in consideration.

Answer # 2: It also depends on how much do the eyes see in one go. Now that is a difficult thing to figure.

Answer # 3: It depends on how patient you are with a process of making a beautiful floor or a beautiful wall.

Generally speaking, smaller stones would serve better and look lovelier for a long period time.

Builders and building contractors give us orders for supply of truck-load of granite and marble and natural stone. The give us orders based on ‘samples’ that we show them. They approve the sample. By approval of sample, it means that the supplier has to supply the same quality in every slab of granite. What is quality?

What is quality? Is it uniformity?

Can a certain quantity of natural stone be represented through ‘a sample’? How can anyone in the world guarantee adherence of different slabs of granite to one ‘approved sample’?

Is ‘approved sample’ a perfect piece of granite or stone?

In natural stone and granite, you won’t be able to come to any great understanding of quality. Because of its very nature it is impossible to standardize the quality beyond the physical dimensions of slabs or stone. No matter the sample, you are not going to get identical looking granite or stone.

Even if one assumes that slabs and pieces of stone can be sorted and grouped strictly based on certain parameters, the cost of sorting is prohibitive.

Based on the purchase order, when the material ordered reaches the site, the builders and building contractors and their employees at the site engage in ‘quality checking’. The understanding of ‘quality’ is at best vague, unspecified and unclear, but since there is an ‘approved sample’, these clients offer all kinds of reasons to ‘reject’ the material that’s delivered.

Costs of handling natural stone are so high that all such rejections crush the supplier financially.