Whilst we have now settled on the three marbles which we are going to use for our foyer, I did some research on Terrazzo, just to see whether this would be a good option for the stairs and foyer. As it turns out, the cost of the cement preparation and marble chips, and then the copious grinding and polishing makes it about the same a marble tiles. Hence, we settled on the marble below:
Beige marble (background) for the floor, with the medium tone and dark tone marble for inlaid work around the borders and in the circular compass tesselation in the middle. The gold-leaf glass tiles provide nice highlights to the marble (and I'm sure we can incorporate then somewhere).
Terrazzo is a product that can be used on walkways, patios, floors, and counter-tops. It is actually more a process than a product. It is made by layering concrete then sandy cement, then scattering a dense covering of selected chips of marble / stone / glass / shells etc on top of the cement. Once it has dried well, the surface is progressively ground down and then polished to achieve the finished effect.
This is an eco-friendly option as one can recycle the stone chips or glass, and there is no carbon cost to importing granite or marble as everything is created on-site.
Above photo from DMI Tile and marble IncMore examples of Terrazzo floors...
Above photo from the NTMA websiteFor a good article on how Terrazzo is made, visit This Old House here
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I quite like terrazzo, but much prefer marble. I always find the use of it completely alien to my eye in Italian interiors, such as in Venice, but of course it's completely at home there. We have it in our lift lobbies here, and I certainly don't object to its use there; but inside the flat it's granite.
ReplyDeleteIn the 1920's in Florida all the wonderful homes on the private islands had terrazzo flors, they wear well, I have lived with them, Marble has a higher shine and drove me nuts, you can see the dust.
ReplyDeleteI was constantly useing the dust mop on the marble. The house maid
ordered a treated mop delevered every week. I liked kiving with the terrazzo. yvonne