Natural materials or porcelain stoneware: an open debate among designers

Natural Materials or Porcelain Stoneware?
When it comes to surface coverings for design and architecture, the choice divides professionals because there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Opting for one material or another isn't just a matter of taste: the complexity of projects requires a thoughtful decision based on aesthetic-functional needs, the context in which it operates, and the client's requirements.

Natural Materials
Natural materials have an "authentic" spirit and contain within them a millennia-old story. Through their materiality, they convey specific emotional and sensory sensations that are closely linked to our historical memory, their original provenance, and their direct connection with nature. Wood, for example, expresses the artistry of nature through its grain, offers a pleasant tactile sensation, has a soft and unmistakable sound, and is appreciated for its fragrances that stimulate the sense of smell. A space clad in wood gives a feeling of warmth and comfort.

Stone has an ancestral connection with humans; the cave was, in fact, their first shelter. Stone is history, at first glance, it can give a sense of rustic and conveys a sense of belonging to places, or appear natural and elegant. Marble is precious, used since antiquity to enhance religious or commemorative buildings, evoking the "luxury of stones" from ancient cultures, and its composition communicates wealth and solemnity.

Limits of Natural Materials
The use of natural materials as coverings in contemporary projects can have limitations related to their technical performance, and the sensory qualities sometimes are not enough to prefer them over the latest generation products. Parquet might not be suitable for very humid places like bathrooms or spas; porous stone in a kitchen or restaurant might stain irreversibly; marble in a public square could easily crack and be difficult to replace. In the case of natural materials, indeed, interventions on the covering that involve replacing portions of the material do not ensure a perfect match due to the inevitable color difference between the existing product and the new addition.

To meet the demand of those clients who do not want to give up the aesthetic appeal of a natural effect while having practical and functional coverings, the market has proposed an alternative solution that reinterprets traditional materials and perfects their technical and functional qualities. We are talking about porcelain stoneware.

Porcelain Stoneware
Firstly, porcelain stoneware is also made from natural raw materials: clay, kaolin, sand, and feldspar. Its roots go deep into the history of ceramics, and even earlier, of terracotta. Its physical characteristics make it extraordinarily resistant to impact and abrasion, waterproof, durable over time, easy to maintain, and importantly, sustainable from a production standpoint: new technologies allow for a significantly reduced environmental impact and its life cycle - from production to disposal - is more eco-friendly compared to other materials. Its versatility and lightness allow it to be used in new constructions or interventions on existing structures, and modern decoration technologies make it a design material, with increasingly sophisticated aesthetic details.

 

 

Advantages of Porcelain in Design and Installation
When considering traditional materials for architectural coverings, they have well-defined technical and aesthetic qualities that are closely connected to their nature and physical composition, leading designers to search for compromises. Porcelain stoneware, with its aesthetic versatility and technical characteristics, answers a desire for expressive freedom by designers. Porcelain with cement, wood, corten, stone, marble effects: a single material can be transformed in a thousand different ways while maintaining resistance, durability, and timelessness. The market availability of slabs of different thicknesses allows designers to use this material not only for designing walls and floors but also as countertops for bathrooms and kitchens and as cladding for furniture.

Thanks to its high technical and aesthetic versatility, porcelain can be used as the sole material within a project, significantly simplifying the installation process. The use of different materials often requires the involvement of multiple specialized technicians (stonemasons, wood artisans...) and various interventions on-site. Porcelain, on the other hand, allows for having a single point of contact throughout the project execution without sacrificing a multifaceted aesthetic and multiple material inspirations.

Moreover, using a single material also provides significant technical-application benefits. For example, thermal expansion varies depending on the material used and can complicate the juxtaposition of heterogeneous products, potentially leading to issues even after installation. Porcelain, with its numerous aesthetic effects, allows for creating different and customized combinations, even with different material interpretations without any technical concerns about expansion.

Porcelain that Interprets Natural Materials
The porcelain market is continually growing, aiming to surpass its own limits by exploring ever-new decorative effects and surface finishes, up to reinterpreting the aesthetics of natural materials. From wood to marble effects, from cement to stone, porcelain is capable of varying traditional materials in different colors, offering a broad spectrum of innovative solutions. The possibility of digitally tailoring tile design ensures control over the visual characteristics of the materials inspired as well as the definition of their finishes: through the elimination or emphasis of knots in wood, the saturation of marble colors, redesigning veins for corner solutions or adjacent slabs, porcelain stoneware does not replace nature, but reinterprets it by perfecting it and delivering it back to designers and clients without compromising high performance standards.

Thus, what leads to preferring porcelain over any other material - and vice versa - are the project needs and the goals of living comfort that are to be achieved. The possibility of using traditional materials combined with porcelain to create unprecedented synergies and uniquely designed environments is not excluded, but indeed desirable.

An example is represented by the Radisson Hotel Santa Sofia, where oak parquet and marble-effect porcelain work side by side to achieve the same result: an intimate but elegant environment where natural aesthetics and technicality harmoniously dialogue.