Porcelain paving: What is it and how is it used?

Elevate your home and enhance your garden space with our porcelain paving slabs. At London Stone, we're market leaders in the supply of porcelain paving, providing high quality products for any budget. We are a family-run business that believes in always putting our customers first, offering you products and services to suit your every need.

All our paving materials can be purchased directly through our website. Alternatively, we have ten showrooms where customers can view porcelain paving alongside our complete range of paving slabs and other hard landscaping materials.

Porcelain is a popular choice, versatile enough for all your landscaping projects. It combines strength and the look of natural stone with a sophisticated, contemporary finish, ensuring optimum style. Useful for both residential and commercial settings, it can help you to create the perfect outdoor living space, suitable for entertaining all year round.

Porcelain paving has a wide range of benefits and is useful for a variety of applications, including:

• Patios and walkways
• Swimming pool surrounds
• Garden pathways
• Driveways

However, this is not a comprehensive list. If you have a specific design idea in mind, please do not hesitate to discuss it with us.

Get in touch with our helpful team and we will do what we can to bring your ideas to life.

Our Range of Porcelain Paving Slabs

London Stone's porcelain paving is a great choice for a contemporary and modern design. Our porcelain patio tiles have a highly consistent colouring and surface texture, making them the ideal complement to clean lines.

Sourced from Italy and India, and split into different collections to enable you to easily choose the best design for your requirements, our impressive range of porcelain paving slabs is carefully chosen for its superior quality. It offers a vast range of colour and surface texture options, ensuring there are products suitable to all budgets and project styles. From our light-enhancing Cream Porcelain Paving to our stylish Sidewalk large format tiles, there really is something for everyone.

We also offer a bespoke cutting service, which means that whatever you desire, we'll be able to achieve for you.

Unlike natural stone, each porcelain paving slab is fully rectified. This means there is no dimensional tolerance and every slab is exactly the same size. This allows tile spacers to be used when laying, with the result that pointing gaps between slabs are perfectly consistent, adding a crisp quality to the modern design.

Introduced in 2019, our 900 x 600 porcelain paving collection led the way in expanding the use of this material, as previously it had not been available in this classic stone paving size. The Budget Porcelain range, manufactured in India and Italy, offers a modern finish at a more affordable price.

Or why not take a closer look at our Premium Italian porcelain? This is a mid-range price selection that has been specifically developed by our suppliers to mimic a natural stone appearance. This and our Luxury Italian ranges offer effortless quality and a more luxurious finish.

Want to understand our porcelain paving ranges better? We explain the differences between our collections and why you can buy with confidence, whatever your budget. Here’s a brief summary:

Luxury Italian

Luxury Italian Porcelain is our most exceptional outdoor porcelain collection. Stunning visual appeal is combined with the world’s finest production methods to produce an outdoor porcelain tile that is high quality and long-lasting. Fully vitrified and full bodied.

Premium Italian

Premium Italian Porcelain combines the timeless beauty of the finest sawn natural limestones with the low maintenance properties and graceful finish of factory-made porcelain slabs. Fully vitrified and full bodied, this range represents exceptional value. Made exclusively for London Stone.

Budget Porcelain

Most of the products in this range are manufactured in India and are a great choice for modern garden projects. Available in a wide range of colours and sizes to suit your design, this collection represents excellent value for money, and is high quality. Fully vitrified, made exclusively for London Stone.

This range also includes budget Italian Porcelain that is made exclusively for London Stone. It combines world-leading Italian manufacturing techniques with minimal patterning and a refined colour palette, to give a stunning end result at a surprisingly affordable price. Fully vitrified and full bodied.

800x800 Porcelain

London Stone’s 800x800mm Porcelain collection offers high quality and durability with stylish, minimalist modernity. Perfect for laying in expansive, elegant areas, these 20mm thick outdoor tiles are manufactured to world-class Italian standards. Fully vitrified and full bodied.

Times are changing and over the past several years we have seen porcelain explode in popularity. Many landscapers and designers are now opting for porcelain over natural stone. Find out why and get insights into what experts think of our porcelain paving.

One of the biggest benefits of porcelain is its longevity and low-maintenance properties. Find out why our porcelain outdoor tiles are so robust and long-lasting in our visit to manufacturer Caesar's state-of-the-art factory.

Discover the Benefits of London Stone's Porcelain Paving Slabs

At London Stone, our customer-centric philosophy drives us to fulfil your every desire; so long as it is within our capabilities, we are committed to making it happen. This commitment ensures all our items provide a wide range of benefits to our customers, with our Premium Porcelain paving slabs being one of our topline products.

Our outdoor porcelain tiles are known for their durability, able to carry most weights. They can withstand heavy foot traffic, as well as any garden furniture you would like to place on top of them. This means that you can create a fantastic outdoor living space, perfect for entertaining. If an important birthday is coming up, you can impress visitors with the contemporary finish our paving slabs provide, ensuring that your party guests will be talking about your patio for months to come.

Our porcelain paving slabs are weather-resistant, ensuring negligible wear and tear for years. They require minimal maintenance and are effortless to clean, without the need for sealing or special treatments. Our porcelain tiles also have textured surfaces, making them slip-resistant. This makes them a good option if you have an outdoor pool or are concerned about the British weather making things slippery.

Are Porcelain Tiles Suitable for Outdoor Use?

Our porcelain paving tiles are suitable for outdoor use, offering exceptional versatility to meet the demands of the modern world. The fact that they do not absorb as much water as many other materials (with water absorption values under 0.01% on Italian porcelain and under 0.05% on Indian porcelain) makes them highly resistant to frost. Additionally, our porcelain pavers are also fade-resistant, scratch-resistant and stain-resistant, with a textured finish to ensure enhanced grip.

Among the advantages of using exterior porcelain patio slabs is that they are relatively low maintenance compared to other materials, making them easier to clean and an ideal choice for busy households.

However, if you’d prefer to use another type of material, we also have a vast range of other paving options available, including our classic clay brick pavers and our stylish natural stone pavers.

Porcelain patio ideas

What's life without inspiration? Check out our paving blog for design ideas and award-winning gardens. You’ll find:

Patio ideas at RHS shows  Designers choose porcelain for show gardens that give lots of take-home ideas.

Mix-and-match paving for design impact Want a bold design? Porcelain paving slabs are ideal for mixing and matching colours and we show how some of our clients made the most of this opportunity.

The pros and cons of dark paving Dark hard landscaping makes for striking design, but is it right for you?

Designing with XL paving  Stand-out style is made possible with extra-large format outdoor tiles. Find out more about,  or take a closer look at reasons to choose 800x800 paving.

Why 900x600 paving is a practical choice We look at why 900x600mm is the most popular slab size for garden paving.

Combine porcelain slabs and clay pavers  Put your own personal stamp on your patio with your bespoke choice of colours and textures.

For many more articles, visit our Porcelain, Stone and Clay Paving pages.

FAQs

Do You Offer an Installation Service for Your Range of Porcelain Slabs?

We do not offer an installation service for porcelain slabs. However, if you require a landscaper or garden designer, our Landscape Specialist Scheme may be of use.

Before committing to a landscaper, you should ensure that the person you choose is right for your design project. It is worth asking your proposed tradesperson if you can view a portfolio of similar works - we also recommend getting several quotations before making a commitment.

More information about installing our outdoor tiles can be found on our Installation FAQ page.

Can I Return My Porcelain Slabs if I Am Not Happy with Them?

It is rare that our customers are unhappy with our products. However, in the unlikely event of an issue developing with your outdoor tiles, we will do our utmost to ensure a suitable resolution is found. In these instances, we ask that you contact us as soon as possible, so that we can put the issue right for you fast. Rectifying order issues is more difficult once your items have been installed, so we recommend that you get in touch as quickly as possible.

We understand that sometimes people change their minds. When purchasing your porcelain slabs from London Stone, you have the right to cancel your order and return your items within 14 days of delivery. The only exception to this is bespoke and pre-sealed items. Please note that your patio slabs must be returned in their original condition and packing.

If your outdoor tiles are faulty, damaged, not fit for purpose or not as described, you have a 30-day period in which to return them. We will also collect the materials at our own cost, taking full responsibility in these situations.

How Long Will It Take to Deliver My Porcelain Slabs?

At London Stone, we pride ourselves on our fast shipping times, keeping a huge variety of items in stock at any time. If your order of porcelain slabs is placed before 1pm, we can usually deliver your products the next day. Find out more in our general FAQ section.

Bespoke orders need to be manufactured before shipping, so the lead times for these items can vary. For further information, please speak to a member of our team.

Customers can also collect their outdoor tiles from our Southern distribution centre near Heathrow, or our Northern distribution hub in Manchester.

Do You Have Any Showrooms I Can Visit?

Yes, we currently have ten showroom locations based around the country:

• Birmingham
• Bristol
• Hampshire
• Kent
• Manchester
• Middlesex
• North London
• Surrey
• Hartlepool
• Great Barrow

When visiting our showrooms, you can view our wide range of porcelain paving items and see how they might look when placed in your outdoor space.

Our showrooms are conveniently located, displaying all our porcelain paving products in an aesthetically pleasing manner. We also offer free parking, hot and cold refreshments, and free Wi-Fi, making you feel at home in every location.