Granite Transformations, the home makeover specialist that deals exclusively through its own network of showrooms, has announced the debut of its new porcelain work surface collection. A completely new raw material for the brand and amongst the first on the market, porcelain is smooth and refined to the touch, but one of the hardest materials on Earth, making it beautiful and durable for kitchen and bathroom makeovers.
Porcelain is a ceramic material made with kaolin, a fine white china clay, which is fired at temperatures up to 1400°C. Its properties include outstanding hardness, strength and durability, as well as high resistance to chemical attack and thermal shock. The new material meets the same technical specifications as Granite Transformations’ granite, quartz and recycled glass surfaces, if not slightly superior toughness.
There are three new work surface colours in the Porcelain Collection: Terra Chiara (1606) and Terra di Siena (1607), each with varying flecks of gold, brown, black and white, and the finely grained Sierra Nevada (1624), which is lighter and more neutral in colour, like a ‘snowy range’. All feature the brand’s characteristic ¼” (6.7mm) slimline profile, enabling the material to be fitted directly over existing worktops and tiled surfaces, and a composite construction of porcelain granules and a high tech polymer resin that ensures outstanding strength, flexibility and durability.
The new porcelain finishes are perfect for kitchen worktops and splashbacks, vanity units and wash basin countertops, bath panels and surrounds, shower liners, and hard flooring, the large 3m long slab sizes enabling virtually seamless decorative surfaces. In common with all the brand’s surfaces, they are fabricated and installed by Granite Transformations showrooms and come with a lifetime warranty.
“Granite Transformations prides itself on providing stylish, high quality and environment-friendly products and our new Porcelain Collection captures these attributes and has a distinctive, welcoming feel,” explains Danny Hanlon, the company’s Chief Operating Officer. “Our manufacturing arm was approached by a major high-end producer of bathroom products about the possibility of incorporating remnant porcelain into our product line. Considering we are already at the forefront of using recycled raw materials to design stronger, more durable, eco-friendly granite, quartz and glass worktops and finishing surfaces, this was a natural progression for us.”
Supplied by one of the world’s largest manufacturers of designer bathroom furniture, the recycled porcelain comes from reject bathtubs, sinks and sanitary ware, which are crushed to workable fragments and used in the distinctive Granite Transformations manufacturing process. Beige and brown colour tones are contributed by the ‘bisque’ or central section of the porcelain, while the white flecks come from the enamel used to glaze the material. The proportion of post-industrial porcelain content is 51%, together with recycled glass and granite, underlining the material’s ‘green’ credentials.
Porcelain has been used in bathrooms for centuries, because it is super strong and durable, as well as being waterproof, clean and sanitary, not allowing dirt or bacteria to penetrate. It is also easy to clean, will withstand aggressive cleaning products, and lasts a lifetime, typically put through the equivalent of 20 years’ performance testing, or 80,000 scrubs. What better then for bathroom rejects, than becoming stylish bathroom finishes?
