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   • Renaissance Project House  
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We’ve built a beautiful Project House with a classic stucco exterior. Our design team has placed stone trim and detailing all over the exterior of the house to accentuate and complement that stucco façade. The designers have chosen a number of the same stone materials for the Project House exterior that they selected for various interior locations, to maintain a visual and textural continuity.

We're covering four options chosen for the exterior of our project house - Natural Stone, Cast Stone, and Natural or Ceramic (man-made) Tiles.

Nothing can match the beauty, the texture and the feel of natural stone. The Project House exterior features an array of strikingly beautiful stone and ceramic tile work from every corner of the globe including Italy, China, India, Brazil and Portugal.

How do you choose between natural stone and man-made ceramics for your tile work? You’ll have to strike a balance among varying factors - appearance, cost and maintenance. Stone tiles are 20 to 30 percent more expensive than ceramics that attempt a comparable look. The big difference is in maintenance. Ceramics are relatively maintenance-free.

Types of Stone
Natural Stone tile is quarried out of the ground in huge blocks. The blocks are sliced into slabs; the slabs are sliced into strips, and the strips are sawn into tiles. The Italians lead the world in stone-cutting technology. Blocks of stone come out of the ground all over the World (Spain, Portugal, Mexico and Brazil are big in the market now), but more often than not those blocks are shipped to Italy to be cut and returned. So a block of Texas Limestone may get shipped to Italy to be cut before it’s returned and distributed here in the States.

Since ceramic tile is a man-made product, it’s totally predictable and controllable in terms of color, texture and appearance. Stone is a product of nature. It varies like wine, in that granite from one region can have a completely different appearance and texture than granite from another region. Sometimes there’s great variety from one side of a mountain to another. You can also experience great variation within a single block of stone, so you should be prepared for imperfections and inconsistencies when you receive a bundle of tiles. If variations in color or veining will bother you a lot, you may have to buy considerably more tile than you need, so you can weed out the imperfections and get the most consistency out of your order as possible. Stone dealers rarely offer any guarantee or compensation against the fickle variations of Nature.

Travertine tiles form the edging around the pool and hot tub, and create the border around the front of the Project House. It’s the same material the designers chose for the interior floors. Travertine is a variation of limestone. It’s a soft, sedimentary rock, formed by a buildup of layers of sand deposits over millions of years. Travertine formed near ancient lakebeds and underground springs. The pressure of water and gas bubbling up through those layers of sediment for millions of years fills Travertine with natural pits and craters.

We chose Slate tiles from India and China for the floors of the three exterior balconies on the Project House. The designers also added a ribbon of slate to detail the stucco wall that encloses our back yard. Slate is a metamorphic rock, formed when layers of sediment are toughened by heat and pressure. Slate’s a little softer than marble. Slate gets its character because all that heat and pressure makes all those individual sedimentary layers very brittle. Slate tends to split along grain lines, almost like very brittle pages in a book.

A stone supplier named Maxent has provided Distressed Marble tiles, direct from a quarry in Italy, for our driveway. Marble is apparently a very popular and relatively common surface material for driveways in Italy. The 12”x12” tiles have been sand-blasted to form a non-skid surface for the driveway. The designers like them so much that they’ve chosen distressed marble to decorate the pool deck in the back. The non-skid marble surface will help keep everyone safe around the pool as well.

Because the tiles have been sand-blasted for driveway safety, the beauty and detail of the marble has been lost somewhat. We’re going to recover some of that beauty and detail by applying muriatic acid to the tile surface. That’s a relatively mild acid made of chlorine – the same chemical that cleans your pool. The acid will burn off a bit of the brushed tile surface (but not so much that the tiles are dangerously slick in the driveway) to once again reveal the beauty and detail of the marble.

You should use a special stone soap to clean stone tiles. Regular sudsy floor cleaners will eat away at the finish on stone tile.