Cultured Stone

This is something I Looove! It's a product that Boral are distributing called Cultured Stone and as real as it may look- it's not. It's actually a man made stone facade product.

As you can see from this display wall it comes in a heap of different selections of stone.

It's made in the US and the stones are finished off by hand with some having the moss effect painted on.

The stone is about 50mm thick and in this example you see it stuck directly onto the besser block wall. This photo also shows the stone with the mortar joints, but the first photo shows an example of the stone without mortar- as a tight fit application. It's still stuck on at the back, but has tight gaps and therefore didn't need the mortar.

This is also a tight fit example. The way the stone is "glued" on depends upon what substrate it's going on. Besser block walls are pretty straight forward, but fibro board needs a few more layers to help the adhesion such as wire mesh.

The stone comes as individual pieces in a crate. Then the trick is to lay it out on the ground first to get a layout you're happy with where all the stones seem to fit together, and then transfer that bit by bit onto the wall. It works out to supply cost of roughly $150 sq meter. You can also get corner stones, which have the stone appearance on 2 sides and are priced by the lineal meter. Boral can recommend installers, which is obviously the best way to go.

This selection of stone is my favourite look. It's a blend of 80% Dressed Fieldstone and 20% Southern Ledgestone. It's tight fitted without the visible mortar joints.

Boral have stone walls on display at their yards at Darra and Wacol. They don't yet have all the stone ranges up, as there are so many.

I think that depending upon the experience level of the installer you'll end up with different looks every time. It's one of those things that you get better at and a more developed eye the more you do it.

However in a few months time my builders and I are going to have a go ourselves and clad my fire place in my new extension in the stone. I'll post pics then. I'm always up for a bit of fun and we think that between the 3 of us we should be able to get it looking good.