Enhance Your Home with Stone
From rustic to traditional, old world to contemporary, perhaps no other material imparts an air of distinction quite like stone. Highly prized for centuries, a stone finish — whether inside or outside — remains a popular choice of designers, architects, builders and homeowners.
In the past, enjoying the appearance of stone meant costly materials, extra engineering for stabilization and expensive installation. Today’s stone veneer products have changed all that, making it affordable and easy to add the realistic look and feel of stone to a home’s exterior and interior.
Decor and design trends continue to embrace all things natural and rustic, which means the look of stone is here to stay. Add to that the ever-increasing popularity of green building materials and stone veneer is a smart way to reflect your love for nature in your home. Best of all, the number of styles and colors make it adaptable to any house style.
Personalize your home
In addition to the affordable cost and easy installation, the one-of-a-kind look of stone veneer makes it a favorite of homeowners and design professionals alike.
Stone veneer delivers intricate shapes, unique textures and dynamic colors not available in other cladding choices. The best products feature pigment that has been hand-applied by colorists who treat each stone created with great care. The color is varied intentionally — if you’ve ever really looked at a real stone, you know there’s no such thing as “uniform color.” Special attention to small details like these helps create a realistic product. And, because stone veneer is just 1/3 of the weight of natural stone, it can be used almost anywhere inside or outside your home.
Stone Veneer Style
From classic to rustic to contemporary, there is a stone veneer to suit your taste and match your home’s architectural style. First, consider the style of the stones, and how they fit together. Are they dry-stacked or grouted? Are they irregularly shaped and organically spaced or similar in size and evenly spaced? The look you desire is all in the details.
Stone Veneer Color Options
Created from a mix of base color and multiple highlight colors, the hues available in today’s stone veneer ranges from earth tones including brown, red, yellow, sand and taupe, to cooler tones with hints of blue, purple and grey. This wide variety of color allows you to match any color scheme and design criteria to create a truly personalized, well-designed exterior.
Grout Style & Color
Grout, also referred to as mortar, is the material that adheres stones, tiles or bricks to a wall and fills the voids between them. While it may seem like an afterthought there are several looks that can be achieved with the grout between stones.
Grout style can be dry stack, full joint or standard joint. And colors of grout can range from standard grey to lighter or darker shades that can be tinted to complement the colors in a stone color palette.
Your Home’s Exterior
Incorporating the look of local stone is essential to establishing the organic appearance, sense of space, and openness that evokes the feeling of nature. The style and color of stone veneer you choose must not only fit the region where you live, but also the style of home you’re building, remodeling or embellishing. In fact, some home styles are incomplete without stone accents. Without stone, a French country, Spanish, Prairie, Arts and Crafts or Italian design will not express their true design significance.
In addition to cladding or enhancing a home exterior, stone veneer can also be used to build stone pillars on front porches, on chimneys, around bay windows and above doors.
Your Home’s Interior
Have a French country home with a less-than-remarkable fireplace? Give it flair by creating a floor-to-ceiling stone hearth. Traditional kitchen looking a little dated? Adding a kitchen island or wet bar clad in stone can completely remake your kitchen for a small price. Always wanted a spa-like bath? Stone veneer can transform a boring powder room into the spa escape of your dreams, whether accenting around a tub, above the vanity or covering an entire wall.
Unlike full dimensional masonry, stone veneer requires no special engineering or footings to apply, so it can be installed over existing walls and structures fairly easily.