Twenty millimeters
Most of this range is 20 mm thick. The listings show that as 20 mm and, converted, as 0.79 or 0.78 of an inch depending on where the rounding fell, so three figures describe one piece. An interior porcelain floor tile is typically 9 mm.
The extra material buys breaking strength, and breaking strength is what lets a piece be supported at its edges instead of bonded across its whole back. That is the difference between a tile and a paver, and it decides everything else about how the piece can be used.
Bonded tile against loose-laid paver
A bonded floor tile never spans anything: the slab underneath carries the load and the tile only has to not crack. A 20 mm paver is asked to carry load itself, which opens three installations a thin tile has no access to.
The extreme case is a pedestal system over a roof deck or a balcony, where the piece is held at its four corners and everything between them is air. A 9 mm tile there breaks under the first person who stands in the middle of it. Dry laying on sand or gravel is the gentler case: the bed does support the whole back, but it settles unevenly over time, so a piece has to survive being carried in some places and not others. That is also why a paver can sit straight on turf as a stepping stone.
The stones it imitates
Limestone look leads, then travertine, then slate, bluestone and quartz, with wood and marble behind them. The order follows the market: those are the stones that were already out on patios and pool decks, and porcelain went after the jobs they were doing.
Bluestone look is the interesting one because real bluestone comes from a handful of quarries and arrives in the sizes those quarries saw, while a porcelain version can be produced in any format a job wants. Both are worth having and they answer different constraints. The stone pavers range holds the quarried equivalents.
Matte and almost only matte
Nearly everything here is matte, which outdoors is a working decision before it is a visual one. A shiny surface in direct sun is uncomfortable to look at, and it is smooth exactly where it is going to be walked on wet.
The handful of polished and lappato pieces in this range are the ones that sit under cover, on a porch or an outdoor kitchen wall, not out on an exposed deck.
Formats for outside
24x24 leads by a distance, which is the usual paver square. 24x48 is the large-format group with a smaller 36x36 above it, 13x24 and 12x24 are the rectangles, and 12x48 is the plank for the wood-look series.
There is also a mixed format group: a single product supplying more than one size so a terrace can be laid in a repeating pattern with several sizes in it. That is how a modular or Roman pattern is sold, and it is a different way of ordering, because the thing being ordered is a pattern with several sizes inside it.
Color outdoors
White, gray and beige take most of this range, and its long tail carries stone names where other ranges carry color words: Montauk Black, Indiana Grey Select. Those are the trade names of the slates and limestones the faces were taken from, which is a more useful label when the point is to match something already on site.
Tone matters more outdoors than in, and not because of fashion. A surface in direct sun sends back what it does not absorb, so a pale deck stays usable barefoot in July and a dark one does not, whatever it is made of.
The V scale on a listing
Shade variation on porcelain is published on a four-point scale and V3 is the commonest figure in this range. V1 means the pieces are nearly identical, V2 slight variation, V3 moderate, V4 substantial: two tiles from a V4 series can look like two different products.
Outdoors a higher number is usually what somebody is buying, because a stone terrace was never uniform. V1 and V2 have their own place indoors and in commercial work, where a floor is meant to read as one continuous surface and any variation registers as a fault.
Porcelain pool coping
Coping in porcelain is a product line of its own, which surprises people who expect a paver with one edge shaped. It caps the pool edge, it has to match a profile the shell was built for, and it carries a different loading than the deck behind it.
The pool coping range sets out the profiles, in stone as well as porcelain.
The series behind the range
Frontier20 is the largest single series here, and Livingstyle, Legions, Soreno, Vortexa, Cementique and Beton sit behind it. A series matters more outdoors than in, because a terrace usually needs a paver, a coping and a step in the same face.
The Frontier20 range is that series on its own page. For the wider outdoor catalog in every material, outdoor tile is the hub.
