Last month, the Surface Design Show once again returned to Islington’s Business Design Centre, providing a prime platform for the UK’s architectural materials market – including many tile and stone companies.
From the 6-8 of February, the London venue hosted a programme of panels and presentations, a number of special features, a suite of exhibitors, and visitors from across the A&D and trade worlds. In addition to exhibiting ourselves, the TSJ team also prowled the show floor this year to discover all of the tile and stone on display and to evaluate how our industry stacks up (sometimes literally!) against the other materials on show.
A towering achievement
Continuing its long-standing partnership with architecture firm Squire & Partners, Stone Federation GB once again occupied a large section of the show floor with a custom-built installation. This year’s version of the feature – Stone Tapestry: Beyond the Surface – was built by The Stonemasonry Company in collaboration with Webb Yates Design Engineers. Unlike previous editions, however, which saw stones from across the world assembled into a flat collage, this year’s installation was a fully-fledged three-dimensional structure, made entirely from UK-sourced stone.
According to the organisation: “Stone Tapestry: Beyond the Surface is designed to showcase the beauty, sustainability and versatility of natural stone found in the United Kingdom. It explores how a structural use of stone – alongside a design approach that embraces the natural range of tones and textures found in a quarry – can play a major part in delivering projects that far outperform the sustainability credentials of other materials.
“Defined by the need to limit weight and be demountable, while celebrating the material’s potential, Beyond the Surface utilises often discarded pieces of stone, allowing them to work together in a skeletal, lightweight crafted framework, post-tensioned with steel. The selected stones celebrate the wonderfully wide range of colours, finishes and properties of British Stone. Both ancient and futuristic, and very energy efficient.”
The piece was created with UK stones from Albion Stone, Britannicus Stone, Dunhouse Quarry, Hutton Stone and Tradstocks.
International intrique
While Stone Federation promoted the sustainability story of materials sourced in the UK, the show also attracted many tile and stone suppliers from Europe and beyond, all competing for a slice of the lucrative UK specification market. The Italian Trade Agency once again collaborated with Confindustria Marmomacchine (the Italian Association of Producers and Processors of Marbles, Granites and Natural Stones) to showcase a select group of companies along with their products and services. Many of these companies highlighted the level of bespoke detail they were able to achieve in the form of accurately cut stone and meticulous mosaic.
On the porcelain and ceramic side, Tile of Spain exhibited once again, showcasing a small but representative sample of its members’ products. Among the 17 manufacturers displayed on the stand, the association identified a number of themes, Faded Elegance, Fine Lines, Terrific Terracotta, From Walls to Floor, and Triangles with a Twist. According to Tile of Spain: “From nostalgic patterns to eye-catching optical effects, the humble triangle (and variations on the theme) is making its presence felt in recent Spanish tile collections. Versatility is key to the ceramic industry in Spain and hi-tech factories are able to produce everything from ‘handmade’ aesthetics to contemporary prints.”
Outside of this more “establishment” view of Spanish ceramics, emerging design studio Flic (founded in 2022) showcased its Sarab ceramic tiles. These 3D matchstick-style tiles tap into the huge popularity of wall reliefs, and according to the designers: “Its triangular prism shape and different-colour enamel on the sides produces a visual effect of colour change and/or a gradient, depending on the viewer’s perspective.” This effect inspired the name Sarab, which means Mirage in Arabic.
From further afield still, a number of Indian companies chose to exhibit at this year’s SDS. Asian Granito India (AGL) for example, which produces some 98,000sqm of tiles a day across its nine manufacturing facilities in Gujarat, took one of the largest stands at the show, displaying an array of large format tiles with convincing effects. 4Tile, Win-Tel Ceramics, Letina Wall and Floor Tiles, and Sparten Granito also made the trip, broadly showcasing larger format porcelain with realistic stone-effects.
The Surface Design Show will return to the Business Design Centre in 2025 from 4-6 February.
