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The demand for stone, be it real or faux, is always, always there. And one of the reason
this came into a lot of popularity was because of Venice, because Venice, as you know, is
a city that has been built on water and you cannot really use very, very heavy blocks
of stone or marble to build walls there because the city is already sinking and you don't
want to add to the weight. So even two or three hundreds years ago, Venetian plaster
and stone were actually the alternatives that were used.
So here I have an example of stone which is just on a piece of poster board and that just
has the quality of a home stone. Other uses of stone are when you have let's say a chimney
breast and this is exactly what was a dilemma for a couple of my clients who had this wonderful
stone which was real on the facade of their fireplace, but on the return walls, which
were possibly maybe 18 inches deep, they had no stone. And the stone mason had gone and
it was very, very difficult for them to actually match up the stone to make it match the front
of the fireplace.
So we had a couple of solutions for them. First, they were going along at the thought
that they may want a Trompe l'oeil stone which is really a flat surface, but it appears to
be raised. So this was very much like the stone in their fireplace and then the shadow
work and the highlights are put in just so that this looks raised, but actually it's
completely smooth and flat. So they saw this and not terribly convinced, so we went back
and made another sample which was a textured stone which was much more like their fireplace.
So I did the grout lines and then applied texture and then used a lot of glazes to match
the stones that they already existing on their fireplace. So this is the one that we eventually
went for and you can see from the photograph how well that worked. So those are some of
the uses for a faux finish for stone.