In the two years since we last spoke with the Stone Federation, the sector has undergone significant development, from the ever more urgent focus on sustainability to an increased awareness of the viability of stone as a loadbearing structural material. For this month’s focus feature, we once again spoke with Matt Robb, marketing and media manager for Stone Federation, about how the organisation is addressing these pressing issues in 2025. To begin, however, we asked afresh why a specifier ought to consider stone in first place…
As Robb puts it, stone is “the original sustainable material,” having been used by architects, designers and builders for generations across a variety of different projects, from full buildings to interior features. More than that, he says, stone has proven itself as a material that lasts, defining the architecture and the interior design of towns and cities across the world: “You go to any major world city, and one of the things that most defines its architecture is often its stone buildings.”
Beyond that more intuitive argument in favour of stone’s lasting appeal, Robb points to more modern data, specifically referencing a study published by the DNV (Germany’s official association for the natural stone industry), which compared the global warming potential of different floorcoverings over a 50-year span. According to this study, “the GWP of a natural stone slab is about 27% lower than that of a terrazzo tile and about 74% less than that of large-format ceramics”.
Finally, Robb points out, stone is a beautiful material, one which many companies in the porcelain and ceramics industry have spent a lot of money attempting to accurately replicate. “What’s been really encouraging to see, particularly over the last couple of years,” he says, “is a return back to what nature has already given us. If nature has given us these amazing tones and textures and patterns, why try and cook up something man-made when it’s already there available in the ground?”
What now?
Perhaps it’s obvious that the Stone Federation would be promoting the usage of stone, but it’s one thing to make arguments in the abstract, and quite another to convince designers, architects and contractors to actually use the material to its full potential across its full breadth of applications. As Robb says: “There almost isn’t a built environment application that stone isn’t suitable for, ”so why isn’t it being specified more?”
In 2025, the organisation is aiming to address that gap by “equipping architects and engineers and designers and clients to fully utilise stone’s sustainability credentials”. Since we last spoke in 2022, Robb explains, the Stone Federation has worked on inspiring the next generation, connecting with hundreds of young designers and architects through its Stone Symposium conference and other events, and it has observed that this incoming cohort is more enthusiastic than ever about the sustainability potential of stone.
“What we want to do this year is move it from them being inspired to then informing that inspiration,” Robb says, suggesting that a big part of the issue across the supply chain is simply a lack of knowledge and understanding about the materials being used. As such, the Stone Federation is working on several documents, one covering structural uses of stone and one specifically aimed at the domestic residential interiors market, both of which aim to arm their readers with “the information they need to deliver a really successful stone project,” Robb says. “It’s giving them the questions to ask. It’s giving them the information they really need to understand the material.”
This information gap is exacerbated, according to the Stone Federation, by certain misconceptions around materials. “Sometimes that can come from where some of stone’s competitor products make these sweeping generalisations,” says Robb. “For us, clarity is really important, so one of the things this guide will be doing is defining what is a natural stone and what is an engineered stone, and giving homeowners and clients just a baseline understanding of geology and how that affects applications.”
Part of the organisation’s push towards working with younger talent is a plan to launch a student architect prize later on this year, which will focus particularly on exploring stone’s sustainability credentials. Beyond that, the Stone Federation is currently working with the Society of British and International Interior Design to host some breakfast briefing sessions for young designers and offer a “101” of what they need to know when designing with stone.
Finally, Robb says, the goal is of course to promote Stone Federation members as the premier partners for these upcoming projects, and to get them involved as early as possible in the process. As such, facilitating connections between its members and the upcoming generation of architects and designers is another key priority for the organisation this year. “What we always say is that the earlier you can get a stone expert involved in a project, the more chance of success there will be.”
Practically speaking
While the next generation of architects and designers are fully bought into stone, the sector still faces the same challenge as the construction industry at large: a lack of interest and excitement in practical work. “For us,” Robb says, “where we see the biggest challenge is the practical masonry and stone fitting side. It’s a national, cultural problem with how practical jobs and practical skills haven’t been given the respect they deserve.”
Aiming to address this issue, the Federation has followed through on developing a resource Robb first mentioned to us two years ago – the Stone Academy. The academy is designed to function as the organisation’s training arm, creating resources and pathways particularly focused around well-defined career progression – an area where practical jobs can often lag behind.
“Within stone that can sometimes be slightly disjointed, with courses here and one or two-day upskills over here, where we need to have really defined career progression pathways that mean someone can come in as a stonemason’s yard assistant and work their way up to a really senior level,” Robb says.
In addition to this investment in practical careers, the Federation is also promoting greater inclusion in the industry. The Women in Natural Stone Group launched back in 2023 and has hosted several events designed to encourage wider participation in the industry from a school and university age.
This bolstering of the sector’s overall size and skill is a crucial part of the Stone Federation’s task over the next decade. After all, there’s little good in getting stone more widely specified if there’s no one to fit it!
New frontiers
The Federation is paying close attention to and indeed helping promote the growing momentum behind stone as a loadbearing material. “As the trade association for the stone industry,” Robb says, “Stone Federation’s really been at the forefront of that.”
The organisation has hosted conferences and published a range of technical documents designed to help the industry engage with the material in this modernised yet traditional way.
Much like its broader goals, the Federation’s primary challenge when it comes to structural stone is addressing misconceptions and a lack of knowledge in the market. “To put it at a top line level, there has been this odd fascination over the last couple of decades for seeing how thin we can get things. In cutting stone thinner and thinner and thinner, you actually lose some of its sustainability potential,” Robb says.
In this way, the organisation argues for something of a return to tradition – looking at how buildings were built in the past and learning lessons that can be applied to modern contexts: “whether that be iconic places like St. Pauls Cathedral or Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, or even some of the townhouses we see in Bath and the Cotswolds.”
Where stone is used in this more natural way, Robb says, allowing it to carry the structure of a building rather than merely using it as a finishing product, its sustainability benefits are fully utilised. As exemplified by the emergence of groups like the Stone Collective, loadbearing stone is increasingly being viewed as the next frontier for the stone industry at large.
“Of course, using stone structurally in itself is nothing new, but the exciting thing is there are some really innovative modern engineering techniques and approaches that are being coupled with this approach to develop some exciting post-tensioned, pre-stressed stone systems,” Robb says. Indeed, some of these techniques have even been used at projects like the Sagrada Familia, demonstrating a real sense of continuity between traditional and ultra-modern applications of stone.
Closer to home
While the potential use cases for stone are expanding, the opposite effect is taking place in sourcing. It may sound counterintuitive in a fully globalised economy where manufacturing has been largely outsourced from the UK across most industries, but as the Stone Federation argues, where you get your stone from is just as important as how you use it when it comes to the material’s sustainability.
“We have for a long time had a real push for UK stone and for raising awareness of what’s here,” says Robb, “but I think in the last few years there’s been a notch up on that.” The organisation has developed a tool on its website called Welcome to British Stones, which is a map-based sourcing tool which lists all of the UK stones quarried by its members, with more than 90 materials listed.
Changing perceptions is once again the goal for The Stone Federation here, with what Robb describes as a “chicken and egg” dynamic around the specification of some of the historically used but now little known British stones. While there’s a growing awareness of the variety and viability of these products, the availability isn’t always there, and this leads to a lack of specification which drives down demand. “But there are companies that are taking the leap and really looking to break the cycle and bring these products to market,” Robb says. It is important to reiterate, however, there is an ample supply of indigenous material available as it is, despite some common misconceptions.
As the construction industry’s collective understanding of sustainability becomes more nuanced and holistic, accounting for emissions throughout the entire life cycle of a product, the question of where materials come from has become more and more important. With that in mind, local sourcing is yet another way in which The Stone Federation is aiming to buck modern ideas around materials and return to a more traditional, less environmentally impactful method.
“We’re really encouraging designers and architects to engage with what’s here in the UK,” says Robb. “We know there will be some projects or clients or designs that require a material that comes from further afield, but even in that dynamic, we’re seeing a shift.” Where a few years ago specifiers’ only concerns were looks and price, whether the material came from next door or half the world away, now “a lot of the main contractors” are beginning to push back against materials sourced from outside Europe.
Fortunately, Robb says, UK designers need not worry that their creativity should be overly stifled by restricting themselves to more local stones. For the past two years, the Stone Federation has collaborated with Squire Partners on an installation called The Stone Tapestry, which exclusively uses UK stone and is designed to “showcase the breadth of what’s out there”.
A small price to pay
The elephant in the room when it comes to stone, of course, is price – or at least the perception of price. As Robb puts it, “often the cost of stone is less what’s selected and more what’s rejected”. If the industry rejects more than half of the material being quarried for purely aesthetic reasons, the price of that material will naturally skyrocket. “It’s about putting a bit of agency and ownership back onto the designers and clients,” he says.
Ultimately, the Federation argues, the cost of stone can be reduced by working with nature rather than against it. Robb relays the story of an architect who visited one of the Portland stone mines. “Standing there in this cathedral-esque space, he just said: Who am I to tell nature what to do?”
Additionally, as our collective understanding of sustainability grows to encompass both impact on the environment and impact on people, our evaluation of materials must evolve with it. In that sense, while the cost of other surface and structural materials may appear much lower on the surface, Robb says, their cost to the environment and to people can often be higher.
In this, along with the questions of local sourcing and structural stone, there are many minds still left to change. Fortunately, much like the material itself, the stone industry is a patient and resilient one, standing ready to support the next era of construction.
www.stonefed.org.uk
