Fernhill Stone Cladding - the Professional choice... by Meredith Jackson

Back in 1999, the marketing of natural stone on a national scale was limited….
When someone thought of using stone, the first major task they had was ascertaining where it could be sourced - if they saw a project they liked, it was hard to find out were the product came from.
The natural stone mason tradesmen tended to have a bad reputation; where they would start the job, come for 3 days & not appear for the 4^th - therefore a job that should have taken a short time to complete was dragging out, with the client ending up sick of looking at a pile of stone lying in a heap, scaffolding on hire for months & delays inevitably holding up other trades….
I knew we could cut out all these problems by giving not just stone, but a complete service.
When I first came across this product back in 1997, I had come from a background of over 18 years in the construction industry. In February 1999, I came onboard with Fernhill Stone.
At first, people just laughed at our product, & could not believe that anyone would want a manufactured stone cladding when we have so much stone & so many quarries all around the country.
My thought was that this is one of the best products that I had seen to come on the Irish market in years…
The beauty of stone cladding is it’s ease of installation.
This means that any good tradesman can fit the product with ease & simplicity, to the point that it is DIY. The only requirement is one of common sense - & of course, to be neat & tidy!
Stone cladding varies in thickness, from 12mm up to 60 mm. The thinness of the stone has major cost-saving benefits, by means of removing the requirement to extend the roof overhang on the building – which would involve paying for more timber, battens, felt & tiles. It also omits having to buy large window cills to allow for the thickness of natural stone, which can be from 150mm up to 220mm.
Stone cladding allows us to provide such a large selection of stone types & colours so that we are able to match the cladding to the local stone in all areas of the country.
Stone cladding can be considered a far more cost-effective option over natural stone for numerous reasons, namingly;
- there are no additional foundations required when using stone cladding.
- 2 men can fit between 10-20 square metres per day, in comparison to natural stone, where they would fit 3-5 square metres per day, thus potentially cutting the cost by more than 50%. The ease-of-fitting associated with stone cladding is imperative when restaurants, hotels, bars etc., decide to refurb – it’s entirely in their interest to have a contractor in & out in the fastest possible time, ensuring that they can re-open asap & avoid excess loss of custom & revenue.
- with stone cladding, there is no wastage. If you require 50 square metres, then that is what you buy.
With natural stone (depending on the stone type) you can have anything between 20 & 50% wastage….
The light-weight characteristics of stone cladding allow it to be used in so many project variations – it even allows for it to be fitted onto stud walls. Refurb projects benefit hugely from this, as in many cases, heavy natural stone would simply not be an option. Stone cladding has given the interior designers a fantastic variety of styles, textures & colours to add into their designs.
When most people decide to run with a project, they make their decision & want to act on it straight away. Our product & service allows for this as, at any time, we carry over one million euro worth of stock. Stone cladding comes in square metre boxes, which allows the product to be transported on pallets, & carried to location with ease & speed.
Stone cladding got a bad name back in the 1970s - it was made from concrete, which made it a heavy product. As well as this, the manufacturing technique was poor - as was the quality - which resulted in the finished product looking fake.
However, stone cladding has come along way since then.
The leading manufacturers now produce stone that even stone masons, who have spent 50 years in the trade, cannot differentiate between it & natural stone. One of the major things that has improved is the supply of 90 degree corner stones – when these are used, it means you can not tell that the stone is only 50 mm thick, which was always the tell-tale sign of cladding.
With stone cladding, you can transform an existing building, inside or out, with ease & simplicity – a fantastic way to revitalise a tired old building.
This would not be an option with natural stone in most situations, due to contributing factors such as weight, foundations, roof overhang, cills & allowing for natural stone thickness. Fernhill Stone’s stone cladding allows you to avail of the benefits of our products’ speed of fitting, reduced cost, availability, variety & increased possibilities for usage, as well as avoiding specialist tradesmen at a high cost.