Outdoor Engineering Hard Landscaping, made easy...
Walk outside onto any hard landscaped surface in the UK that isn’t covered in cheap concrete slabs, and look down. The chances are you will be standing on stone or timber, the perfect materials for warm dry climates. Now look up. You see the problem?
For a country that traditionally favours organic materials as our exterior surfaces, we don’t really have the ideal climate for that preference. In a land of unpredictable temperature changes, intermittent bouts of intense sunlight, and reliable doses of dew and precipitation - common sense would suggest the UK is actually an environment far more suited to an exterior material that is frost proof, fade proof, mould proof, stain proof, immune to thermal expansion or contraction, scratch resistant and slip resistant. Or, as the rest of Europe already call it, porcelain.
Two major developments have occurred in the ceramics industry over the last decade that have directly resulted in the new wave of double-depth porcelain tiles already so popular across mainland Europe. First, all the major ceramics factories changed from ink rollers to high-resolution ink-jet printers as the method of applying surface decoration to their tiles - so it is no longer really ‘surface decoration’ at all, as the ink-jets now spray the pigments right down into every minute indentation of the tile surface, allowing the manufacturers to design heavily textured tiles with slip-resistant surfaces, created specifically for exterior applications.
Secondly, the ceramics industry (particularly in Italy) was keeping a careful eye on the ever increasing popularity of adjustable pedestals as the new installation ‘system of choice’ for most flat- roof, balcony and large terrace projects here in the UK. Originally combined with a thick concrete or natural stone slab, pedestal based flooring systems are quick and cheap to lay (they need no bedding or grouting) and can hide a multitude of sins in the void created underneath - well, more usually pipes and cabling actually. In addition, the adhesive free pedestal system means that any tile can be lifted, at any time in the future, to gain easy access for maintenance of the substrate below. So it was only a question of time before the major porcelain manufacturers developed new moulds for a ‘double-depth’ 20mm thick tile, strong enough to support the weight of a car even when just supported by a pedestal in each corner.
Porcelain is much more resistant to surface abrasion than hardwood timber, and so rigid that the 20mm exterior tiles are more than a match for stone several times thicker, and therefore heavier - which of course means less pallets of material delivered and stored on site. Also, many installers are now commenting that the exact and reliable dimensions of porcelain tiles mean an end to the time consuming process of sorting out all the different slabs of stone into their various thicknesses before the install can even begin.
Finally, from an aesthetic perspective, 20mm porcelain specialists like Alfresco Floors now stock nearly 100 different surface designs, in several different tile sizes - and will also supply matching 10mm interior tiles, for the seamless interior/exterior applications that are becoming so popular.
With well over twenty years of design and manufacturing history behind the story of pedestals (which started in Belgium) and over five years of R&D by the Italian factories making 20mm porcelain tiles - we are probably now in the best position to benefit from those technologies right here in the UK. Whether you are looking to create exterior hard landscaping projects on a traditional mortar bed, or on the new raised pedestal system, 20mm porcelain tiles will give you the closest thing to a ‘maintenance free’ surface you can find. The impermeable nature of porcelain means that no moisture can ever get in to create frost damage, no mould can ever get purchase to grow on the surface, and nothing within can expand or contract enough to cause any lateral movement - so you can confidently lay porcelain tiles with as little as 2mm gaps between them - and that’s how it will remain,
ALFRESCO FLOORS
whatever the weather, forever. Well, for at least fifty years - which is how long the manufacturers guarantee their tiles to be immune from any sunlight induced fading or colour change. And that’s in countries that get guaranteed sunlight!
So, walk outside onto a hard landscaped surface in a year or two and look down again - you might be surprised by the new technology and materials that are springing up right under your feet...
TEL: 020 8977 0904 25
WWW.ALFRESCOFLOORS.CO.UK
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