Designing indoor flooring with granite

As a natural product, granite nowadays provides an infinite number of design possibilities thanks to the extensive range of varieties existing on the market and the new cutting and surface finishing technologies. Compared to other indoor flooring materials, granite mostly stands out thanks to its high resistance and excellent durability.
When choosing a variety of granite for an indoor project, this will require making a series of decisions on issues such as the following:
• The desired tone: The internationalisation of the market allows a highly extensive catalogue of stones to be offered to designers. The diversity of colours, tones and textures place granite well above other types of products, with the added special feature of each piece being unique.
• The effect to be achieved, through surface finishing: The surface finishing of a stone constitutes the skin of the work and represents, along with the format and variety of stone, its identity. Surface finishes are always evolving, but the most used methods for indoor flooring are smoothing, polishing, pumicing or ageing effects, mainly due to their ease of maintenance and cleaning.
• The chosen tile format: The current market is prone to increasingly larger formats, but you will have to take into account the slenderness of the pieces and the type of traffic that they will support..
• There are loads that the flooring may be subject to, loads that are many times uncontrolled but will need to be limited (pedestrian intensity, frequency of passage, possibility for vehicles or wheeled equipment to pass, etc.). All of this must be considered to calculate the necessary thickness of the tiles.
• A paving system with natural stone requires each of the included elements to be measured (granite, gripping layer, joints, regularisation layer, curb, etc.).
• It will be necessary to know the technical characteristics of the granite, through laboratory tests. In the specific case of indoor flooring, the minimum characterisation parameters to know about are:
-Resistance to bending, in order to calculate the thickness of the tiles.
-Absorption of water at atmospheric pressure, on low areas of the building that could be in contact with the ground.
-Slipping resistance: assessing that it meets the requirements of the Technical Building Code for its intended use.
• And finally, having a team that places them with care so that the result is optimal.