You’ve probably read about the fancy new stonework in the International Apple store fit outs, if you haven’t, you can read about it here, here and here.

The sandstone used in the international fit outs was called Pietra Serena, a high quality Italian sandstone which is more uniform than traditional sandstones, without any structural veining. It presents a consistent grayish blue colour with even tones. The final cuts for the Apple project produced tiles that were precisely 750mm x 750mm x 20 mm.

A critical element of the quarrying and cutting process for Apple was to perfectly match the color and texture of the stone. Since the stone is a medium-toned color, any variation in lightness or darkness would be very conspicuous—tiles of different tones would make the inside of an Apple store would look like a chessboard. An exterior stone wall would looking similarly odd, with varying tones of stone. It’s been reported that Apple purchased an entire quarry in order to reserve and guarantee that it would have a supply of stone from the same vein of sandstone, helping to insure a uniform grain and tone. More likely, Apple has reserved a portion of the Il Casone quarry for its own future needs.

Il Casone says that Apple’s architects, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, “prefer a regular pattern of laying (the stone tiles), without staggering any of the slabs and with very subtle joints in terms of colour and thickness. The consequent idea is to create a continuous plane. The perceptive result is a pale and orderly backdrop, whose strength and character lie in the elegance of each millimetre of surface, without ever interfering with the interpretation of places, with the avant-garde technology enclosed in chromium-plated metals and glass, or with the relationship between customer and product.”

Our Bolzano sandstone is mined in the same quarry as Pietra Serena and is essentially the same however Pietra Serena is mined near the top of the quarry whereas Bolzano is mined further down in the quarry making it denser (and therefore stronger) because it has been exposed to more heat closer to the earth’s core and has undergone more compacting.

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