From commercial pilot to general contractor: (13) Researching the stone

Another in our our continuing series of blogs from John Bleasby, commercial pilot turned general contractor on his family’s home north of Toronto. To see others in the series, type “pilot” in our search bar, and the other entries will pop up for you.

As attractive as our low, linear, flat roof home design is, we needed some contrasting elements to avoid a monotonous look. Therefore, our architect added a front-to-back/over-the-roof arch feature to the house to break the horizontally line just so. However, we needed to introduce a new texture to an otherwise sleek exterior finish, and to do the same in the interior on our fireplace feature wall. We chose stone.

There is real stone and there is man-made stone. There are solid stone pieces and there are real stone slice panels. There is a huge variety of colours, design, textures, thicknesses and width, and of course price ranges for each. We had to make some decisions.

Exterior:
Price dictated that real stone was beyond our budget.  We would choose from the vast selection of sliced stone product, generally about 1 ½” thick. We then realised that from a distance, smaller stone elements would lose their individual shape and become a blur. Larger stone, even in the ledge-rock, dry-stack style we preferred, would look great. After all, you don’t usually put your nose right up against an exterior stone; you’re at a distance of some sort.

Don’t settle for rectangular stone panels; look for dovetailed chiseled panels for corners (above) and dovetailed straight cuts for flat sections.

Would we choose individual stone slices or stone slice panels? Our research revealed while that most 1’ by 2’ panels of stone slices are handy to install, they result in very obvious vertical seams between each panel. This was not going to pass our test for reality! Therefore we leaned towards individual man-made stone slices. They might be more time consuming to install, but a skilled stone mason would be able to mix and match the sizes to develop a very realistic layout.

In the end, we found a Canadian manufacturer who combined everything we wanted: individual man-made stone slices, realistic colours, and very good pricing.

Interior:
Unlike an exterior wall, an interior fireplace wall requires a smaller stone, since the viewing distance is often 10 feet or less. Therefore, we again rejected the rectangular 1’ by 2’ stone panels that are widely available due to the obvious vertical seams between each. Further research led us to stone panels with dove-tailed ‘chiselled’ ends for corners (see photo) and dovetailed straight cuts for flat sections. This makes a huge difference in the final appearance of the pattern. A skilled stone mason can even make his own dovetails and chiselled ends. Mitering the corners simply won’t work because the individual stone piece thicknesses vary, so the mitres won’t be realistic.

We also decided that given the relatively small area to be covered, and close viewing distance, it was well worth the price premium to use small real stone slice panels versus their man-made counterparts.

Stone patterns, colours and choices (and prices) gets very personal. But the objective of realistic stone work is shared by all, whether on the exterior or the interior. ‘Researching the Stone’ will help reach that objective. After all, it will be there for a while!