Natural stone cladding

Every homeowner wants to have an aesthetically pleasing and attractive building. Very often people draw conclusions about the building as a whole and even about its owners based entirely on its appearance. One of the best looking options for improving the overall appearance of the building is natural stone cladding. The stone facade is not only practical, but also looks good and gives the house authentic style and class. Natural stone is quite a popular material, as it is eco-friendly and completely safe in terms of health. It has many naturally occurring advantages over other popular cladding materials. For example, the stone is an extremely durable material that does not lose its weather resistance and attractive appearance over the years. 

Types of natural stones 

Natural stone is a heavy and expensive material. In order to reduce the cost of the material and its weight so that most structures can withstand it, mainly stone veneer is used. Stone veneer is stone slabs cut from solid stone of various sizes and with thickness usually between 1 and 3 centimeters. 

There are different types of natural stones. Some of the most popular types of cladding are: 

Granite is a frost-resistant stone that comes in a wide variety of species and colors. 

An excellent substitute for granite is basalt. 

Probably the most popular natural stone for finishing buildings is marble, which offers an extraordinary variety of colors and patterns. 

Quartzite is a solid stone with splashes of shiny and glossy grains of quartz in it. 

Some types of limestone are often used for facade cladding - mostly the dense ones. 

Quartz stone is an attractive natural rock that comes in many different colors, and you can find both light and dark shades. 

Travertine is a porous natural stone, mostly with beige and brown color, but there are also lighter shades.

Granite 

Granite has been used as a facade cladding material for ages. It has a granular-crystalline structure, containing a large amount of quartz. There are three types of granite - coarse-grained, medium-grained and fine-grained. 

Among the positive properties of granite are: high durability and trouble-free and prolonged service life; it is easily polished, and the polished surface lasts a long time; it is easy to carve; it is moisture resistant. Granite comes in many different color shades. Thus it fits easily in a variety of architectural styles and color palettes. 

Tuff
Tuff is an excellent option for cladding and has many useful properties. It is heat-resistant, resistant to mechanical stress, and has good thermal conductivity. It is fairly easy to process, and can have an anti-slip effect. Depending on the hardness of the material, it also has a long service life. 

Marble
Marble is a natural rock formed under high pressure and temperature. It usually has light color, but it is not only white, yellowish or light gray, and comes also in black, green, red etc. due to different minerals that can make its shades more diverse. You can often see different patterns on the marble (stains, typical and very beautiful “veins” of different colors). The different patterns stand out much more clearly and become even more pronounced when polished. 

Slate
Slate is a natural cladding material that is formed from sedimentary clay by pressure and heat.  Sometimes it contains quartz. A unique feature of the material is its ability to easily split into plates. Among the useful features of the slate are its strong structure, moisture-resistance, resistance to extreme temperatures, heat and sound insulation properties. It is also easy to cut and process. 

Limestone
Limestone is maybe the cheapest natural stone used for both construction and decoration. It is a sedimentary rock that has an organic origin and contains clay, sand, calcite and quartz.

There are two main types of limestone - earthy limestone and dense, porous, marble-like limestone. The dense one is a calcareous mix of fine grain and the remains of shells. It is more often used as a material for exterior cladding. It is weather-resistant and easy to cut and process. It has a monotonous color palette: yellow, white, shades of gray. 

Natural stone cladding - аdvantages and disadvantages 

As a facing material, natural stone has an eye-catching appearance, аs well as various other advantages. 

Impressive designs - the combination of different textures, sizes and shapes of the stones can create designs that will impress both homeowners and their guests. The natural stones offer a huge selection of original and unique natural color palette. The facade can get the appearance of a "wild stone" wall, classic masonry, etc. 

The natural stone siding is highly weather resistant, UV resistant and resistant to mechanical stress - factors that can damage most of the other popular materials. So, it will serve for quite a long time, proving itself not only as a good-looking, but also as a practical siding option. 

The properties of natural stone siding can turn the house into a building with a natural thermal buffer, which is cool in the hot summer and warm in the cold winter. 

Natural stone cladding is noble and stylish, and emphasizes the social status of the owner of the building. 

Like any material, natural stone has its disadvantages. The main one is its high weight, which makes it difficult to install and also loads heavily the load-bearing structure. Therefore, it is necessary to correctly assess whether it can withstand the weight in order to avoid deformations. The other main disadvantage is its high price. 

Types of natural stone cladding 

There are different ways of natural stone cladding, so everyone can choose what is best for the particular project. For example, you could choose to use flat stones or stone veneer with an irregular shape (usually slate or sandstone). This style requires careful selection of adjacent blocks to avoid too large joints, as well as the accumulation of many too small or too large pieces of stone next to each other. It can even be said that this natural stone cladding style requires some artistry.

Or, you could use rectangle tiles of natural stone with embossed convex surfaces, which resembles the rough masonry of a medieval castle (limestone, sandstone, slate or marble).

Very often, instead of cladding the entire facade of the building, only individual elements are covered in stone - plinths, corners, arches, windows and doors, porches, columns and more. In these cases, the imagination can really run wild and a virtually unlimited variety of stones and shapes can be used - limestone, marble, slate, sandstone and quartzite, rounded river or sea rocks, and you can choose from a rough finish, as well as a ground or polished finish. 

You can checkout some popular stone veneer products here:

https://canyonstonecanada.com/rockstone/rockwalls/Rocky-Ledge

https://canyonstonecanada.com/stonetiles/stonetile/Quartzite-Ledge-Stone

https://canyonstonecanada.com/wallpanels/wallpanel/QuickFit-Ledge-Stone

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash