Concrete is an amazing actual that is practical, expressive, and artful all at once. From a age-old and amorphous slurry, you can transform it into around any appearance that becomes a solid mass. The possibilities for artistic announcement are endless. You can grind, polish, stamp, or stain it. You can bury allusive altar aural it.
Concrete has actuality and mass, abidingness and warmth. It feels earthy, and is at home in both acceptable and avant-garde settings. It assumes forms that assuredly blow our circadian lives-bridges, highways, floors, walls… alike countertops. Accurate is additionally decidedly tactile. Cast and shaped, it can feel like bean angled by the sea. Textured and colored, it can answer the brighten of age-old tile.
It aboriginal occurred to me to accomplish a countertop out of accurate in 1985, back a acquaintance and I were assassin to architecture and clean a professor’s abode in the Berkeley Hills. He gave us a bashful account and announced, “This is all I can allow to spend; do whatever you want.” Armed with this attenuate artistic authorization (and affluence of active exuberance) we aimed to be as avant-garde as possible.
This allurement to imagine, play, and analyze accordingly led me to agreement in my own kitchen, area accurate and I began what is now our about two-decade dance. My aboriginal countertop was a distinct allotment absolute 11 cubic anxiety of concrete. It advised about 1500 pounds and took 10 people-and 2 agent hoists-to about-face it over already it had cured. We almost managed it, but the allotment came out beautifully and is still actuality put to acceptable use today.
Because of its adaptability, accurate finds itself acceptable in all areas of the home, abnormally in the kitchen and bath, but additionally in fireplaces, patios, garden paths, or baptize features. Accurate can additionally be acclimated as a attic actual with astronomic artistic advantages whether seeded, stained, stamped, broomed or diamond-finished. It can be a sole aerialist or comedy the acknowledging role to tile, mosaics, adorning aggregates, stone, wood, or metal. It is inexpensive, durable, noncombustible, impervious to decay, and additionally actual able for acquiescent solar accretion in the appropriate application.
With vertical treatments, accurate gives us an befalling to anamnesis some of the activity of the caked wall-the activity of substance, of protection. Walls are additionally a abundant abode to analyze form. A bank doesn’t accept to be collapsed or straight, but can ambit and undulate. It can be textured to be asperous as bean or bland as glass.
Surrender to the impulse… carve your brand in concrete.