Totalook: interview with the designer
Our interior designer explains the advantages of porcelain stoneware
Around a year after the start of this challenging period, the way we perceive our home has radically changed: we have rediscovered a place to live, every day, not just in the evening after a day at work.
This is why our interior designer advises adopting beneficial solutions when designing floors or walls in the home. However, he also emphasises that they must be pleasant to live in, aesthetically harmonious and in line with the latest design trends.
What is the solution that combines all these features? Porcelain stoneware is the material that perfectly reproduces different patterns, textures and effects. It is certainly a widely used and recognised material, but we are going to take a look at its advantages, outlined by our interior designer.
Not sure which solution to choose for the various rooms in your house? With all its advantages, porcelain stoneware allows you to come up with infinite style variations.
Want to ensure that your floor or wall covering has an impactful aesthetic? Porcelain tiles have an innate stylistic appeal.
Do you need to cover floors in rooms of different sizes? No problem: stoneware is a material that adapts to different floor plans.
Not to mention its technical efficiency: choose the resistance of porcelain stoneware and the sustainability that only this material can offer you.
All these advantages are discussed in detail in the article.
Stoneware enables infinite solutions
When we talk about porcelain stoneware, we are immediately transported to different types of environments since it is renowned for being a material that allows us to design infinite furnishing solutions.
Let’s start with all the effects used for Emilgroup’s stoneware tiles:
- Wood: imbues rooms with a sense of intimacy and conveys both simplicity and character with a minimal design and just the right hints of elegance.
- Marble: excellent for softening the surface’s more classic effect, producing a very strong aesthetic impact characterised by elegance, light and harmony, an unconventional effect that enriches rooms.
- Stone: the stoneware effect you choose to create distinctive colour effects that give public and private spaces a lavish and prestigious style, combining elegance and functionality.
- Majolica: the ideal blend of refinement and vitality, it characterizes the space with incredible modernity and illuminates the rooms with highly intriguing plays of shapes and colours.
There are also effects such as:
- Terracotta: gives the tile rich veining with a timeless beauty, conveying a warm and cosy atmosphere to the whole space.
- Concrete: a striking effect that creates a feeling of peace and order. It is very natural and perfect for those looking for a simple, but characterful style.
- Ceramic: combines classicism with technical innovation, creating an elegant and classy design for different rooms. This is a safe option for those who want to furnish their homes with the best porcelain stoneware product.
- Metal: the effect for those who want to impress and amaze. It is the perfect combination of high-tech design and a super-minimalist look.
- Solid colour: these tiles allow a room’s character to emerge, creating the ideal mix between furnishings and floor or wall tiles.
- Design: a sophisticated style whose truest essence lies in material experimentations, giving rooms a unique character and personality.
Remember for each of the effects just described there are infinite combinations of colours, sizes and shapes: in other words, as our interior designer explains, porcelain stoneware, thanks to its advantages, is the key to success in designing not only our entire home, but perhaps even our shop, garden, showroom or restaurant.
It has an exceptional aesthetic appeal
In terms of the aesthetics of porcelain stoneware, here are two collections that perfectly convey the idea of the exceptional stylistic solutions that can be achieved when designing a space with this material.
A very impressive collection
We kick off with the ceramic collection inspired by limestone: Landscape by Emilceramica. An understated, minimal look distinguishes this collection and the Landscape tiles feature elegant and sophisticated veining with tone-on-tone, very bright colours.
The collection also offers extraordinary technical performance thanks to the new SilkTech technology, an innovation created in Emilgroup’s R&D laboratories, which increases porcelain stoneware’s coefficient of friction and simultaneously ensures surface softness and aesthetic and tactile pleasure.
The expressiveness of granite
Another collection that epitomises the exceptional aesthetic appeal of porcelain stoneware is Grain Stone by Ergon, a perfect combination of the magmatic power of granite, a stone with a minimal and primitive aesthetic, and the versatility of ceramic. Grain Stone is a highly expressive collection that offers designers the ability to create architectural works that will stand the test of time.
It remains attractive despite wear and tear and weather conditions when used as a floor covering in an outdoor environment. It features two warm and two cooler shades, various sizes in different textures and is completed by the Cage Decor, a series of vertical and horizontal incisions that give the surface an attractively substantial, dynamic and tactile look.
The two options, Landscape and Grain Stone, both have a high technical focus, but are perfect for creating contemporary interior and exterior design projects, combining versatility and character.
Stoneware tiles are suitable for rooms of all sizes
That’s right: porcelain stoneware, with all its advantages in terms of size, makes it possible to design rooms of different sizes, from the smallest to the largest. Here is what our interior designer recommends.
Choose a small size (up to 30 cm) or a medium size (30 to 90 cm) and cover your floors, but also your walls, washbasins and table tops.
Create a floor with large tiles (90 to 120 cm) to give the whole space a sense of continuity and to make it appear larger.
Use the large slab (120 x 240 cm) for outdoor areas or showrooms. They can cover large areas.
Opt for the countertop size (160 x 320 cm) if you want to create tops and backsplashes, worktops, tables and doors, as well as other floor and wall covering solutions. Alternatively, choose this countertop size if you need to create striking, seamless spaces.
Finally, go for extra-large tiles (over 120 cm) to make your space appear very large and uniform. Extra-large sizes limit the number of joints and give the room perfect visual continuity.
The technical advantages of stoneware
Now that we have explored the many effects of porcelain stoneware, two collections and various sizes, let’s discover all the advantages that give porcelain stoneware its durability.
We should start by saying that it is a material with low water absorption, which is what makes it one of the most water-repellent solutions on the market.
Additionally, stoneware is resistant to abrasion and impact thanks to the firing and pressing carried out during manufacture, making it an extremely high-performance material.
Porcelain stoneware is also resistant to frost, fire and thermal shock, as well as contact with household chemicals: neither the material’s appearance nor structure change under any of these circumstances.
Stoneware as a sustainable choice
While we are on the subject of porcelain stoneware and its advantages, we would like to stress one last fundamental aspect: this material is not only a stylistic and technical choice, but above all a sustainable option.
When deciding what style to use to furnish our home, the designer advises us to always keep an eye on environmental issues: we try to opt for materials such as stoneware to design our space, while bearing in mind the environment.
Porcelain stoneware does not contain any chemical waterproofing agents, paints or resins and there is no risk of it emitting fumes, even if it is exposed to the heat of a flame. It is a material that does not release radioactive gases and its disposal follows precise rules designed to avoid impacting the planet.
In other words, porcelain stoneware not only looks stylish and offers high technical performance, but is also a totally environmentally friendly solution.
What are you waiting for? If you want to design your home to perfection, choose one of Emilgroup’s porcelain stoneware collections.
08 April 2021
Magazine
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