Floors · Stairs · Worktops · Restoration
Terrazzo tiles laid on adhesive and grouted like ceramic are not terrazzo; they are tiles with terrazzo faces, and every joint between them is the place the floor will eventually fail. The real thing is poured wet across the whole surface, cured, then ground and polished flat so the result is one continuous slab with no grout lines, brass divider strips exactly where the design wants them, and an aggregate mix chosen from marble that we select by hand. It lasts for a century, which is why so many are still in use.
About us
The studio descends from a family firm of terrazzo layers who worked through the decades when the craft nearly disappeared. Poured terrazzo takes weeks where tiles take days, and through the 1980s and 1990s almost every contract went to the faster option. The workshop survived by restoring historic floors nobody else could match, and by the time designers rediscovered the material there were very few people left who had ever poured one. That scarcity is the reason the studio exists in its present form.
We mix our own aggregate. Marble, granite, glass and mother-of-pearl chips are bought from quarries and merchants we have used for decades, graded by size, and blended to a recipe developed with the client through physical samples rather than photographs. Colour in a cured, ground and polished floor bears very little relation to the colour of the wet mix, so we make cast samples, cure them properly, grind them and put them in the actual room before anybody signs anything.
Restoration is half our work and the part we care most about. Floors from the last century turn up under carpet and vinyl in apartments, banks, schools and stations, usually written off as beyond saving, and are almost always recoverable. Grinding back a century of wear to reveal a pattern nobody has seen since it was covered is the most satisfying thing this trade offers, and it is invariably cheaper than the replacement that was being considered.
Advantages
Six reasons this floor will outlive the building's second refurbishment.
A poured floor is a single monolithic slab: nothing to grout, nothing to trap dirt, nothing for a trolley wheel or a heel to catch. Movement is handled by brass or zinc divider strips placed where the structure needs them, which double as the design's drawn lines. Hospitals, kitchens and laboratories choose it for exactly this reason, and so do people who have spent years cleaning grout in a hallway and decided never again.
Chip size, colour, density and binder tone are all variables, so a mix can range from a barely-there speckle to enormous slabs of coloured marble in a dark matrix. We hold hundreds of aggregates, blend to a recipe developed with you, and cast full samples that are cured, ground and polished exactly as the floor will be. What you approve is what gets poured — not an approximation from a catalogue photograph taken under different light.
Because the material arrives wet, curves, borders, logos, thresholds, radiused corners and changes of colour are all simply a matter of setting the divider strips before pouring. Tiles cannot do this without cutting, and cut tiles look cut. We set out full-size on site, agree the geometry with the architect at that point, and produce inlaid work — house names, compass roses, restaurant marks — that reads as part of the floor rather than as an application to it.
The floors we restore are routinely eighty or a hundred years old and have been walked on by millions of people. When the surface eventually dulls it is ground and repolished rather than replaced, removing a fraction of a millimetre and returning it to new, and that can be done several times across a century. Measured over the life of a building it is among the cheapest floors available, which is precisely why institutions chose it.
When a section of an old floor has been destroyed by a doorway, a service trench or a botched repair, we take a sample, identify the aggregates and binder, source equivalents and cast trial patches until the join stops being visible. This is slow, unglamorous work that very few workshops still attempt, and it is the difference between a repaired historic interior and one carrying a permanent scar across the middle of the room.
A poured floor needs its substrate prepared, then pouring, then curing before grinding can begin, and rushing the cure produces a floor that dusts and cracks. We give a real programme at the start, including the weeks when nobody can walk on it, and we will tell a client whose deadline is four weeks away that they need a different material. Nobody has ever been happy with a terrazzo floor that was hurried.
Services
Poured floors, stairs and skirtings, worktops and basins, precast elements, restoration and polishing, and design support.
Traditional cement-bound and modern resin-bound terrazzo laid in place across houses, shops, restaurants, museums and public buildings, in thicknesses from a few millimetres to full traditional beds. We prepare or correct the substrate first, set divider strips to the agreed geometry, pour, cure, then grind through progressive grits to the specified finish. Underfloor heating is entirely compatible and is planned into the build-up from the beginning.
Treads, risers, nosings, landings, coved skirtings that curve up from the floor with no dirt-trapping corner, window sills, thresholds and bench tops, all in the same mix as the floor so the room reads as one material. Stairs are the most demanding terrazzo work there is — every nosing must be identical and every riser plumb — and they are where you can immediately tell an experienced workshop from a new one.
Kitchen and bathroom worktops cast to measure with integrated sinks and drainer grooves, vanity units, shower trays, tables and reception counters, produced in the workshop and delivered finished. Resin-bound mixes give a non-porous, food-safe surface in colours cement cannot reach, while cement-bound work suits those who want the traditional look and are content for the material to develop a patina in use.
Where a poured floor is impossible — an occupied building, an impossible programme, a lightweight structure — we cast panels and tiles in the same mixes and finishes, ground in the workshop and installed with the tightest joint the material allows. It is a compromise and we say so, but a precast floor in our own aggregate is a very different thing from a mass-produced tile bought by the pallet.
Historic floors uncovered from beneath carpet, vinyl and adhesive, cleaned, repaired, reground and polished back to their original state, along with crack stitching, patching where sections are lost, and matching new aggregate to old. We also treat efflorescence, remove decades of wax and sealer, and advise on the maintenance regime that will keep the result. Most floors written off as ruined are recovered for a fraction of replacement cost.
For architects and interior designers we develop bespoke mixes from a brief or a reference image, produce cured and polished samples in usable sizes, advise on divider layout, movement joints, substrate build-ups and realistic programmes, and supply specification text and details for tender documents. Early involvement is worth a great deal here, because the substrate decisions that make a terrazzo floor possible are taken long before we would otherwise appear.
Contacts
Tell us the area, what the substrate is, whether the building is occupied and when you need to walk on it. For restoration, photographs of the floor and of any damaged areas are enough for a first opinion. Sample sets are sent anywhere and we would always rather you saw the material before deciding.
We work nationally on larger contracts and locally on everything else.