Stone quarrying
All our products, whether stone stairs; stone fireplaces; or stone mullions, come from essentially a hole in the ground! All stone in quarried in one way or another. Some quarries are massive industrial sites that blast and cut millions of tons of stone every year. Others are small family owned businesses that produce a fraction of that amount and only supply small localised requirements.
We use exampls from both ends of the scale. Although we predominantly use Limestone, most of which is sourced from France, we regularly get customers that want a stone fireplace made in a stone that is already evident in their property. Sometimes this is impossible, because the quarry has long since closed or been abandoned, but in other cases we have been more lucky and have managed to find a supplier to give us some of the original material
All stone does weather of course, so particularly in the case of external stone work, even though the material comes from the same quarry as the original, the new stone will always look different for a while. The same applies to internal stuff too: A stone fireplace will get stained by smoke, soot and dirt over the years, and a stone staircase will have thousands of hands and feet having ground in dirt for many years.
It’s sometimes possible to ‘distress’ the new stone a little, but there is no subsitute for the effects of time, wear and tear.
Most importantly though the stone texture will match the original.