Most of the floors are offcuts from various stone masons; I'd get a ute load for about $100.00 or in one case a bottle of dimple whisky.

2000-06 - Fitting the off-cuts. I made a flower design to seperate out the colours instead of having a mismatch of everything. Then one day Tony walked in and exclaimed 'love hearts!'...oh well

 

2000-07 - On this floor I polished just the joints with flexible diamond disks and so the joints are rounded

2009 - whereas here I used solid disks which made the whole floor flat, but I had to go over the whole floor.

2005 - design of the Living floor.

2005 - border design

2005 - stairwell floor design - its a chain pattern mapped onto a traditional counter spiral. The spiral is logarithmic and the curved ends of each link are ellipses

2005-09 - I bought 6 sheets of grandee granite and had them cut on a waterjet

 

2005-09 - with the boarder pieces laid in. The waterjet cut corrugates towards the bottom edge, but rather than having large joints I offset the toolpaths for a close joint and then had to grind back the lower edges of the peices to fit.

2005-09 - At the same time I got this peice under the table, and the table top cut. Its called Verde Marinace from Bahia in Brazil

2005-09 - The slab of stone in the entry is Boogardie (WA) Orbicular Granite. It is a spectacular piece 2.7 thousand million years old

2008-05 - For some time I'd been collecting gemstones. I put these facedown on a smooth surface within a 300*500mm form and cast concrete over them. Then mapped each tile into turbocad and figured out which peices I could get out of each tile.

2008-05 - I then drew up the cutting paths, took the tiles and the files for each one to the waterjet people and got them cut. Not all are gemstones. Some are normal granite, and even local jasper and epidote.

2008-05 - Pietra Dura from Pitti Mosaici in Florence. It is an inlay of hard stones. This artform flourished under the Medici, and their workshops are now an amazing but unknown museum - (museo dell'opera della pietra dura - museum of the workshops of hard stone). Notice that each stone has been selected for the correct shading and tonal variation.

2009-01 - Grinding and Polishing the floor

2009-01 - The Lead block on the end weighs about 45Kg.

 

2010-04 - Finished floor

 

 

2010-12 - By now we had a commercial floor polisher, but after standing behind it for hours on end polishing our first job, I decided to automate it.

See the Youtube video

 

2010-08 - Detailing to make the column look as if its sunk into the floor.

 

 

Â