Natural Stone Tile Installation in Calgary

Materials we work with

Marble — Carrara, Calacatta and Statuario — is our most-requested stone for bathroom floors and shower walls. It scratches and etches if you treat it like porcelain; sealed and respected, it ages into something porcelain will never become. We also install travertine (filled and unfilled), tumbled limestone for rustic floors, riven slate for hearths and entries, and quartzite for high-traffic feature walls.

Honed, polished, brushed and leathered finishes all install slightly differently. Honed marble shows haze from sanded grout; we use a non-sanded mineral grout or pre-seal the stone before grouting. It's the kind of detail that separates a five-year stone floor from a fifty-year one.

Lippage, sealing and grout colour

Natural stone tiles are sawn from blocks and vary slightly in thickness — sometimes by a millimetre or more across a single pallet. We sort the batch on arrival, set with a wedge-and-clip leveling system, and back-butter every piece. Stones get pre-sealed before grouting and re-sealed after install with a penetrating silicone-based sealer that won't change the colour. Grout colour is chosen with samples on the actual stone, in your actual lighting, before we mix a batch.

Substrate, decoupling and waterproofing

Stone is heavier and less forgiving than porcelain. On floors we install over Schluter Ditra-XL or 1/2-inch cement board with thinset bonding both sides. In showers we run Kerdi or Wedi waterproofing over the entire substrate before any stone touches it — natural stone is porous and a leak behind it shows up months later as mineral staining and efflorescence.