Architectural and landscape design trends featuring natural stone cladding, from modern minimal ledgestone to rustic crazy paving.
The common read on ledger stone is that it is a rustic material for fireplaces and mountain cabins. That read is a decade out of date. Ledger stone exterior cladding in long, thin, linear courses is now one of the clean…
The kitchen was finished, and the owners kept turning off the under-cabinet light to watch the wall. The stone contractor had left a 12 millimeter gap behind the ledger panels and run a warm-white LED strip through it, …
The porch plan showed two square columns flanking the front door, each 3 meters high and wrapped in a dark veneer that matched the foundation stone. The homeowner had assumed the columns would be brick, or painted fiber…
Most courtyard drawings start with the paving. That is the wrong end. A courtyard reads as a room because of its walls and its enclosure. It reads on where the eye lands when you stand at the gate. None of that is on th…
Two houses on the same street in Maine, both finished last spring. The neighbors watched one keep its color through the season while the other showed white film along the lower courses by August. The difference was not …
A ski chalet that reads as cozy from the road has one thing on its facade: stone in the right places. Timber alone reads as a cabin; stone alone reads as a fortress; the two together, with the stone massing where snow, …
An airport concourse is the hardest regular environment in commercial construction. Tens of thousands of passengers walk it daily, luggage wheels grind the same lanes, cleaning crews hit it with chemicals, and fire and …
Farmhouse kitchens get their warmth from layered texture, and no layer does more than the wall behind the range. Traditional farmhouses used plaster, timber, and chimney stone. The modern version trades the chimney for …
Resort pools trade on the material story as much as the water. A wall of stone behind the deep end, a flagstone apron that reads dry even when wet, cabana facades that match the pool edge, entrance columns that frame th…
An outdoor shower is the most honest test of exterior stone design, because every element is doing a job at the same time. The wall has to block a sightline, take being hosed down daily, look like something out of a res…
