Natural Stone Tile in Mississauga & Barrie

• Marble: bathroom floors and walls, fireplace surrounds, feature walls, shower walls. Polished for a formal look, honed for a softer matte that hides etching better. Keep it away from kitchen counters' splash zones and acidic cleaners.
• Travertine: warm, pitted limestone used for bathroom floors, hallways and, in a tumbled finish, patios and pool surrounds. Filled travertine is smoother underfoot; unfilled shows more character and traps more dirt.
• Limestone: soft, even-toned and quiet. Best on walls and low-traffic floors in a honed finish. It stains if left unsealed.
• Slate: the hard-working stone for mudrooms, entries, kitchens and exterior steps. The cleft surface grips wet feet; a honed slate is flatter and easier to clean.
• Granite: the hardest of the group, used for entry floors, commercial lobbies, thresholds and exterior work. It resists scratching and etching better than any other natural stone.

Polished stone shows the full colour and veining but is slippery when wet and shows every etch mark. Honed stone is matte, more forgiving and the finish we steer most bathroom floors toward. Tumbled and brushed finishes soften the edges and the surface, which suits traditional kitchens and outdoor spaces. Cleft, on slate, is the natural split face. See all four under the store lights before you decide, because the same marble can look like two different products across finishes.

A stone sample is one piece of a quarry block. The boxes you receive will range lighter and darker, with more or less veining, and that is normal. Order 15 percent extra rather than the usual 10, open every box, and lay the tile out dry across the whole floor so the range is blended instead of clustered. For a marble shower, ask for sequential pieces so the veining runs.

• White, stone-rated mortar: grey thin-set bleeds through light marble and limestone and leaves shadows.
• Full coverage: stone cracks over voids. Back-butter every piece and use a medium-bed mortar on larger formats.
• Flat, stiff substrate: stone does not flex. Over plywood, use an uncoupling membrane; over concrete, fill and level first.
• Seal before grouting on porous stone, then seal again after, and use unsanded grout on polished faces so the joints do not scratch the surface.
• Green marble and some limestones need an epoxy or specialty setting material; ask before you buy a standard thin-set.

Busy family kitchens where red wine, citrus and tomato sauce land on the floor (use a marble-look porcelain instead), shower floors in polished marble, exterior steps in anything that is not slate or granite, and any project where the budget cannot cover sealing and the extra install time. If the look is what you want and the maintenance is not, marble-look porcelain gets you most of the way there.

Both stores carry the stone, the white mortar, the sealers and the stone-safe cleaners together, and our own crews install marble bathrooms, slate entries and stone feature walls across Mississauga, Barrie, Toronto and the surrounding areas. Mississauga is at 700 Dundas St E; Barrie is at 112 Saunders Rd. Local pages: tile in Mississauga, tile in Barrie, tile in Toronto. For stone-look mosaics, see the mosaic tile range.