You can’t print the endless, you can’t print the beauty of the endless quirks.
And that is why, irrespective of the price we put on stone and pay, stone is arguably the most precious thing available for our experiences and spaces and movements.
Vitrified Tile is an abomination in the name of creating spaces for our living and for our experiences. Sure it costs much cheaper than most natural stone but the story typically stops at just that. Over a life time, you can’t fall in love with the vitrified. It will glaze and gloss and you won’t understand what’s really the loss!
Check this picture of Mint Stone piece for modular elevation design.
This is these modular strip-like of pieces of stone are packed and dispatched to the destination. One picture from a recently dispatched order.
These modular wall elevation patterns can be done in many ways and many combinations. For your project, remember to call us and we may be able to contribute.
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Having interacted with so many customers, patrons, Builders, Architects and Interior Designers over the years, I feel that judging the ‘goodness’ of material has gotten inverted somewhat. Let me explain this.
At first there were no vitrified tiles or ceramic tiles. There was just stone, of course, highly dependent on geography and geology of the time.
At first there were no laminates or veneers. There was just wood. Again dependent on the geography and the diversity of trees.
Transportation improved, so local became available globally.
Techniques of composing and making improved, so imitation of stone and wood became possible. And yet, imitation is just that! Imitation. It is not repetition. Because nothing repeats like Nature.
In certain areas, we feel like we have mastered Nature’s ability to repeat through ‘techniques’ but feels far from truth. We have just coaxed Nature to repeat for our purposes.
Let me get back to Stone for now. See that picture right at the beginning? It is a particular pattern of Granite from down south; am not bothering with the name right now. This is just the first slab/slice of the big block of granite. Slabs and slices behind this one may be quite similar or quite different depending of how geological processes may have transpired eons back.
Now, in these times, a lot of folks judge stone by uniformity. Means, they look for how similar to the first slab are the slabs behind. Atrocious! Where does this behavior come from? From mass-produced stuff. From mass-produced vitrified tiles.
And the irony? All, that’s right, all surface patterns and colors found in vitrified tiles are a copy of some or the other natural surface patterns found in stone or marble or granite. They are like the same 4 or 8 or 16 pages of a book printed over and over again. Yes, vitrified tiles are printed!
So having seen such repetition and ugly exactness in repetition in vitrified tiles, customers start looking at natural stone with the same ugly expectation. And they judge natural stone through such a lens. That’s the inversion. Horror!
Their senses get hijacked; I wonder why that happens so often. Or is it just a ruse to bargain for ridiculous prices after all?!
Hello! Just to remind you, the age of natural stone is greater than the history of all living beings arguably. Far far far far older than the history of human beings.
Pick the ugliest of stone, and it has characteristics of durability and opacity demanded by the structure or construction, it will become endearing, and look perfect in its imperfection and ugliness. Try.
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Durable vs Disposable may feel like opposites actually.
Another question, do you put in efforts to maintain what you consider as ‘disposable’? This is a difficult question. Or may entail some mixed answers. But by and large, you would say, why maintain the stuff that is disposable.
Now, the corollary. Do you put in efforts to maintain what you consider as ‘durable’?
We surely put in more efforts to maintain what is expensive, irrespective of whether is durable or disposable.
Durable vs Disposable is a debate for stuff that’s man-made. Stone is not man-made. We shape it. But we do not ‘make’. We slice it, chisel it, given it dimensions, but we do not ‘manufacture’ it.
Stone is eternal. God’s gift.
What is see below are Cudappah Cobbles with a special surface finish using Shot Blasting.
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It’s crazy how interior designers and architects and even sellers of stone and hyper-expensive luxury marble think. And it’s crazy how even house-owners who are doing up their houses think.
Just because typical house layouts have square or rectangular shaped rooms doesn’t mean the flooring has to be the same. If anything, the flooring needs to disrupt and break the TYRANNY OF THE SQUARE/ RECTANGLE.
How do you do that? You do that by using crazy, non-uniform, dimensional stone slabs and stone pieces.
What you see in the picture can easily be done outdoors. But it can look so so gorgeous indoors too. The question is, do we have the kaarigars to pull it off?
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Yes, while this is clear from the picture that this flooring has been executed outdoors, I want to check how you would feel if the same were done indoors. Think about it. How would your interior design shape up? How would your house feel day after day, month after month? How would you feel sitting on a sofa amidst such flooring?
Get in touch with Mr. G S Soni Mobile: +91 98250 15546
Builders, Architects, Building Contractors, Interior Designers very often ask for samples of stone or granite that they sense they could be using in their projects.
Over the years, it has so happened that most stone suppliers have also encouraged and adopted this practice of sending samples.
What does this mean? It means that the receivers of samples or prospective buyers actually look at samples and differences between samples of different sellers, and make decisions.
That’s all fine; I raise basic question.
IN THE BUSINESS OF STONE, MARBLE AND GRANITE, WHAT IS A SAMPLE?
Say the slab of a certain type of marble or granite is 8 feet * 5 feet. Means it is 40 square feet of surface area of something is ‘given’ by nature.
If you get a sample of size 6 inches * 6 inches of this marble or granite, does it offer you great idea of the entire slab? Does it offer you a great idea of the entire lot of say 30 or 40 slabs of marble sliced from a block, especially given the fact that this is all nature-created? I am afraid it doesn’t.
Of course, samples are made for surface finishing too. But the efficacy of sampling even for this can be doubted on the very same lines.
And then to think that samples are approved and rejected, and business deals are done, and purchase orders issued…
Builders have been seen to take undue advantage of this extremely flawed process of sampling often. They know it, and they trick the sellers.
Aha! I am curious now. Because of this scandal of opulence, what is going to happen? Will Dior Pearl White marble from Vietnam become more popular in India?
I picked this picture of Dior Pearl White marble from a website. Have a look.
At K. K. Stones Ahmedabad, you are going to get only Non-Kejriwal stone. So far that’s the status. That doesn’t mean that you won’t get beautiful stone. Indian white marble is also exquisite.
There are 2 things you must be particular about:
Limiting the size of the stone tile
Staying patient while the mason lays a neat floor for you
When doing up a house, typically customers look for huge slabs of stone as a measure of beauty. We recommend smaller slabs or tiles of stone and the mason’s work as a measure of beauty.
Get in touch with Mr. G S Soni Mobile: +91 98250 15546
More and more folks buying flats are buying big slabs for flooring. If ‘flat’ the word weren’t this bad, now there’s enough done to ensure flatness in the look of a flat too.
Slabs ensure that the flat achieves its flatness. Wisdom would suggest, “Reduce the flatness from this flat”.
What would you do to reduce the flatness? Hire an interior designer?
Dealing with Big Architects, Purchase Managers at Corporate Construction Companies and their Quality Checkers becomes quite awkward on occasions.
When you contact them, often they ask for ‘samples’.
The thing about samples is, for certain kinds of stone or granite, samples may be fairly representative. 100% representation is just not practical and not reliable either. But for most kinds of stone or granite, samples may just not be representative.
Stone, granite, marble are taken out of quarries. Quarries are god’s gift or nature’s gift. They are not factories. They are a storehouse of nature’s abundance, not man-made products.
The insistence of bulk users of natural stone on adherence to ‘samples’ is unreal; no supplier can control that sort of thing. The magic lies in how to compose architectural looks and interior designs with what nature has gifted us with.
Of course, sometimes ‘non-adherence to samples’ is used as a reason to pay less or not pay at all to the supplier. That is malafide intention, trickery, charlatanism.
Can you tell for sure that a 6″ * 6″ sample is a representative of a lot of 4000 sq. ft. of stone or granite. It is ridiculous. More ridiculous since stone dazzles through its variation not through its uniformity.
Machines are slicing bigger and bigger blocks of marble and granite, and creating huge slabs.
Looked in isolation these huge slabs look grand. Typically these slabs are stacked vertically in the stockyard, so eyes look at them as if looking at a wall or painting on a wall.
If the flooring area is huge, these slabs may look alright as floor under your feet. But if the flooring area is a typical flat, you are in for a space-scrunching feeling.
When you are out to buy marble or granite for flooring, check the floor space available between the walls demarcate the floor space. And then divide it by the number of slabs or piece of flat marble or granite you have in mind.
For example if the space is 20′ * 15′, then you get 300 sq. ft. of space for flooring. If you wish to use slabs of 8′ * 2’6″, that means each slab covers 20 sq. ft. of flooring space. So 15 slabs will cover your entire floor.
Instead of 15 slabs, try imagining 45 slabs. There you have a floor worth looking at.
To argue or debate further regarding the aesthetics of big slabs vs small slabs, we are available at our office.
Get in touch with Mr. G S Soni Mobile: +91 98250 15546
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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How is this for your floor? If not indoors, then what about outdoors? Can you appreciate the surface finish of these multi-sided irregular stones?
I’ve observed that plenty of rooms are floored with the same kind of gigantic rectangular slabs of stone or marble, irrespective of the size of surface area to be floored.
Big slabs are faster and may be easier to lay, and therefore quite easily, also quite ugly to look at. The other day I was at someone’s place in Shahibag, Ahmedabad, and they’ve put huge glossy slabs on the walls! Alright!
One measure for those who are getting their interior/exterior design done:
Size of the surface area of the floor / Size of a rectangular slab (or stone piece)
The the greater the result, the better you would feel when the floor is done.
For example, if the room is 15ft * 12ft, and the slab size is 6ft * 2.5ft, it will take just 12 slabs to floor the entire area. Now think if the stone size is 1.5ft * 1.5ft, it will take 80 stone-pieces to floor the area.
Which is a better option? 16 or 80? For your eyes? For your feet? For creative floor surfacing? For the long term?
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.
There’s this semi-fraud-acquaintance who took a lot of assistance from my Dad in getting stone and design related work for his big house project. I am compelled to call it house coz it’s hard to call it bungalow.
One of the features of this man’s project is the numerous kinds of stone and surface material he has used to garnish his house with, both inside and outside.
Needless to say, I was appalled at the way it all felt when I got a chance to visit this site once, more than a year back. The work’s still going on I hear.
Taj Mahal is primarily a one stone work.
Kailash Temple, they say, is not just one stone, it is one-rock work. Incredible, isn’t it.
Now, for the sake of funny arguments, a professional like an architect or an interior designer or a status-symbol-maker may say but these are public monuments, not houses for living. So let me ask another question.
Would you want a house that looks as gorgeous as a monument or a house that looks like a hodge-podge of materials?
Funny argumenter may even say, “But monuments require more money and space to make.” Really? Is that so?
The practitioners and house-makers of today’s age seem to earn a lot from the use of materials instead of the use of imagination. Bitter and easier said and true wherever I see.
In Ahmedabad, you can witness the architectural obscenities in the form of flats almost everywhere you go. Especially the newly developed or developing areas.
Contrast Ahmedabad’s flats with these, built somewhere in China. Out here wonky urban planners and funny builders are trying to extract every little penny out of the FSI allowances and policies by making cubic and cuboidal blocks typically painted in horrible greys and browns.
We are looking for a builder to work with who attempts something like this.
Distinct and charming in its own way! You may want to check some more pictures here.
Please forgive them, the folks at Mail Online (dailymail.co.uk) who have written the linked article and bizarrely titled it Bizarre ‘pyramid-shaped’ building in China becomes an internet sensation.
That’s the Chicken Church of Indonesia. You can’t make such lovely spaces with vitrified tiles. In fact, no lovely spaces deserve vitrified tiles. But you can trust natural stone and marble and granite to help build lovely spaces and lovely places.
The other day I was at PVR Acropolis to watch Tapsee Pannu starrer Thappad. While the movie felt great, PVR’s renovation felt classic and plastic at the same time. When you visit there you’ll notice. The space feels spacious, the floor feels all plastic (courtesy the famed vitrified tiles).
Somewhere in the initial pages of Gavin McCrea’s Mrs Engels, there’s this exchange between Jenny and Lizzie, I can’t forget to share.
In her book, there’s naught worse than a new house that looks new. She said so just now before we left. ‘So long as the thirst for novelty exists independently of all aesthetics considerations,’ she went, ‘the aim of Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham will be to produce objects which shall always appear new. And, Lizzie, is there anything more depressing than that lustre of newness?’
The lustre of newness is depressing indeed on most occasions. And in the case of copy-paste vitrified tiles, plastic too.
And there are folks who tile (funny vitrified tiles are in fashion these days) the space that they are going to spend their life in coz of lack of time! Funny!
Reminder.
Architecture is not about space but about time. – Vito Acconci
That is Teakwood Sandstone! Gorgeous for outdoors, or wall-cladding.
First they demand big big natural stone slabs, granite slabs, and then they demand ‘top’ quality, and then they funnily get down to bargaining for the lowest prices. Understandable since the quantities are often huge. But the thing is it is natural stone.
Big slabs
Should be top quality
Should be lowest priced!
What poetry!
‘Big building business’ has an issue. They behave like government purchase departments. Lowest quote, highest quality. Now where have you found that? And they themselves often struggle to lay down the parameters or even develop the ‘eye’ to judge whether some piece of stone is great or not.
Taj Mahal doesn’t have the greatest quality of white stone. What it does have is the highest quality of craftsmanship.
When choosing granite or other stone for flooring or paving, what really matters? It seems to me currently 2 major points play a role while making a choice:
The color of stone
The natural pattern of stone surface
Surprising when I pay just a little more attention.
Why isn’t ‘shape’ of tile or stone not considered at all! Typically it’s rectangle! Or sometimes, square. Why?
The variations of natural stone coupled with and cut in different shapes can produce a magic-like floor. No, I’m not talking about just outdoors or for landscaping. I’m talking about indoors too. Here, have a look at this indoor floor:
Plenty of variations and colors in Indian granite and other natural stone to create a floor like that. If you want to execute something like that in Ahmedabad…
Get in touch with Mr. G S Soni Mobile: +91 98250 15546
Increasingly now, and over a long time, I observe that natural stone tiling trumps natural stone slabbing.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that all floor needs to be tiled instead of slabbed. We find plenty of floors that are a combination of tiles and slabs and they look good.
But over last many years, so many folks have slabbed their floors edge to edge. As years pass by that doesn’t look as lovely, especially in smaller spaces, though always lovelier and more pleasing than the ‘vitrified’ tiles.
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