Richard Wang first discovered concrete’s chameleon-like properties during a trip he took in 1998 to attend the World of Concrete in Orlando, Florida. After a 20+ hour flight from Beijing, he experienced an epiphany
of sorts when he traversed through a garden on a “wooden plank” path to his room. “I had a fantastic feeling,” he recalls.
The next morning during an early jog before the show, he found the wood seemed harder than what they had in his homeland of China. “I observed it carefully and found it was not real wood. I felt so funny that Americans would make the fake wood so real!” he says.
Furthermore, when he got to the show, he visited seemingly endless booths with companies displaying their tools and materials used to make the imprinted wood concrete. “It was the first time I was aware of this industry,” Wang says.
While exploring the possibilities of decorative concrete after he returned home, Wang entrusted a Chinese friend in Los Angeles to help him conduct a market study. The one name that stood out was Bomanite, which was “bigger and more responsive than the others,” he says.
“I was shocked by the photos, the textures, and mixed colors,” Wang continues. “The precision of tools was beyond my understanding. It was then I started a long-time communication … for the Bomanite exclusive license in China.”
New introductions
Wang says it wasn’t easy convincing his boss to shell out hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars to procure the Bomanite licensing rights, but it was well worth the investment.
Before the late 1990s, concrete was only used structurally in China, says Matthew Casto, CEO of Casto, a consulting firm in Florida, and a long-time colleague of Wang. There were no finished concrete surfaces like
sidewalks or roads. “Richard Wang was responsible for bringing the concept of architectural concrete into a country where it did not previously exist.”
Wang not only introduced decorative concrete to China, Casto adds. “He built a full pipeline including material manufacturing, tool production, labor training, design, and nationwide execution.” He made it his mission to convince owners and government agencies to use a system they had never used before.
“Financing early projects added another layer of pressure because materials had to be manufactured, workers trained, and projects executed long before final payments were received,” Casto explains. “Large
projects required financial partners who believed in Wang’s vision enough to support long construction cycles.”
Paving the way, concrete style
In 2008, Wang and Victor Yue founded Orangestone Hardscape in Beijing, where Yue currently serves as general manager and Wang as president. As a small hardscape company with limited capital, it only
tackled two projects that first year, starting with a high-end resort hotel on Hainan Island. There, the company placed, colored, and stamped a concrete driveway thousands of meters long. That driveway, Wang says, was still performing well when he visited the resort in August 2025.
The second project involved placing more than 10,000 meters of exposed aggregate pervious concrete in a square that was part of the Summer Olympics setting in 2008. The eye-catching project helped the company win a bid in 2010 for the Daming Palace Heritage Park. That national treasure featured
some 400,000 meters of pervious concrete. Orangestone was responsible for 240,000 meters, including a 150,000-meter square, which is perhaps the largest of its kind in the world.
Following the park’s successful launch, Orangestone’s reputation flourished as some colleagues maintain it led the way among China’s best decorative concrete contractors.
The company has won hundreds of awards over the last decade from the Decorative Concrete Council of
the American Society of Concrete Contractors, Bomanite International Ltd., and cement and concrete products associations in China.
Notable projects include Disney Shanghai, Universal Beijing, Lego Shanghai, and Popland Beijing, as well as projects with Chimelong China, the country’s leading theme park developer. Beyond the theme park industry, Orangestone projects also encompass public buildings, city renovations, heritage parks, and industrial parks.
Casto says Wang has installed more decorative concrete than anyone else he knows.
Disney days
Out of all the impressive projects Wang’s been involved with, Shanghai Disney Resort had to be the most challenging, he says. His company partnered with TB Penick & Sons in autumn 2012 to do samples for Walt
Disney Imagineering. “This was the first time we did WDI samples, and we attached great importance to that,” he says. “I physically attended the whole process.”
Although his company had been installing decorative concrete for more than 10 years, “It was a completely new system in front of us,” admits Wang, who holds mechanical engineering and business management degrees from Beijing Technology University. At that time, “WDI’s system was much more professional than the best companies in China’s decorative concrete pavement industry.”
With help from the WDI site team and designers and TB Penick, Wang says they gradually became more confident and capable in meeting the Disney criterion. Subsequently, Orangestone was awarded most of the decorative concrete pavement work in the park.
“I believe one of the reasons we were awarded these works is that we are very serious about our quality from the very beginning. We choose to train and maintain a sustained number of craftsmen,” Wang explains, which then hovered around 500.
Although he realizes it’s often easier to hire temporary crews in this line of work, for him it’s critical to create a stable team. Without one, he says, “We can’t ensure our quality executive force and skill growth.” Today, Orangestone has 140 colleagues and a long-term external labor force of more than 400
craftsmen, the largest such force in China.
Business model focuses
Orangestone’s business model focuses on providing landscape customers with a quick, cost-effective, and personalized solution. “It is normally a paradox that a tailor-made (project) could be rapid delivery and
economical,” Wang says. “However, cast-in-place concrete could achieve this goal. It is the right solution.”
Still, he concedes, flatwork is one of the most difficult systems in the construction industry. Most jobs are not big contracts; many are rather small, he notes. Overall, the success of the business largely relies
on individuals, not mass production. “Finding suitable partners is the biggest challenge,” he says.
Headquartered in Beijing with offices in eight other cities, the company has positioned itself well to promote decorative concrete to leading designers and developers. Its established network supplies the means to keep its 20+ crews busy the whole year, even in the slow winter season, Wang says.
Orangestone also employs a design department whose job is to provide potential clients with free, highly accurate, colorful paving maps of their projects. If the project progresses, the company generates shop drawings.
Artistic design is also under the department’s domain as it introduces clients to innovative products, new patterns and textures, new methods and systems, tailor-made furniture and installation art.
Promoting the industry
In addition to the design department, TSD, a subsidiary of Orangestone, focuses on landscape design and prominent design work, such as area development design of theme parks. “Making money is not its
task,” Wang says. “Its main function is to move up the dialogue level to the design industry. It is slowly evolving the DNA of Orangestone, providing its customers with higher-level options and making Orangestone unique among its competitors.”
In the long run, Wang says, he envisions TSD to evolve into a company that could present clients with a state-of the-art hardscape that would save them time and money. This fits into Orangestone’s overall desire to promote product innovation.
To date, the company has about 90 patents, which include 16 invention patents. Among those are a system for installing large cast-in-place mosaics onto fresh concrete and another that combines pervious concrete with void-structured Grasscrete to support heavy vehicle traffic.
Casto points out Wang is also active in the global decorative concrete community, regularly participating in technical innovation meetings, business strategy discussions, and multinational training events.
“One such event included participants from 14 countries with simultaneous translation in four languages,” Casto says. “Over the years, he has funded and organized significant educational efforts, including trainings in China in which more than 1,000 people have participated.”
Additionally, he says, “His leadership helped transform decorative concrete in China into a world-class industry, and many of his competitors today are people he once trained or supported.”
Importance of architects
Wang realizes Orangestone’s continuing success depends largely on educating architects on the benefits of using cast-in-place concrete and offering support. He says they accomplish this through many means
including samples, new product debuts, brochures, tours of finished projects, seminars, showroom visits, small gifts, and sponsorships.
Back when he was building a relationship with Bomanite, Wang asked a respected master craftsman what the company’s most competitive strength was. He was expecting the answer to be some secret chemical or
tool. Instead, his answer was “service support,” something he understood many years later.
Today, Wang’s company offers architects drawing and specifications support, as well as shares artistic and inspirational works with them on a one-on-one basis. “We prefer to do these services to individual architects or a group of architects in a big design firm,” Wang says.
“It will be slow, but possibly effective, because we believe it will take many meetings and long-term communications to make an architect really understand our system and to know our technology’s advantages and disadvantages.”
Team loyalty
A stable, loyal team is paramount to Orangestone’s success, Wang maintains.
“A not-too-small company in our industry needs to do three ‘mores’ (to advance),” he says. “(We need to be) more artistic than a contractor, more commercial than an artist and more contractor-like than a businessman.”
Wang has taken care to assemble a team of craftsmen, experts and workers that all work together to achieve this collective goal. In short, he wants “people that continuously innovate, maintain vitality, understand each other and solve cross-departmental problems,” he says.
“The hard-working Orangestone team and the beautiful vision of art concrete business are my motivation,” Wang says. “Don’t harbor any thoughts of luck. Actions have consequences after all.”
