The world's foremost resource on decorative concrete
Concrete’s natural color can be altered with powder or liquid stains, dyes and colored hardeners, as well as aggregates such as ground glass and stone.
I love color. Bright, vibrant, fun colors that pop. Deep, rich tones that soothe. Soft, gentle tones with minimal contrast. Thinking about color always leads to texture, mottling, layering, variegation or marbling. I cannot think of one instance when I would want a paintlike solid color on one of my projects. To me, color and depth go hand in hand.
When preparing a brand new concrete surface to be acid-stained, don’t take anything for granted. Every step of the new concrete pour contains elements that might affect the quality of your acid stain job.
With its 1,149-foot “space needle,” the Stratosphere Casino, Hotel & Tower is a Las Vegas landmark. When its owners, American Casino & Entertainment Properties LLC, remodeled it inside and out in fall 2012, they asked Owen Ondrisko, of Stampco Concrete, Henderson, Nevada, to design landscaping and concrete for the approaches to the building.
J.C. Santy Construction, Pulaski, Wisconsin, uses metallic and mica powders from Crescent Bronze Powder Co. to bring brilliant color to decorative concrete. One prime example is The Children’s Garden created by artisan and owner Brad Santy for the Brown County Public Library in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The go-cart track at the Legoland Discovery Center was another challenging, yet fun, job for Chris Post of Elite Concrete Solutions LLC. The roadway hash marks required him to make a 2-by-4 jig to lay them in an evenly spaced manner all the way around the track.
Columnist, Chris Sullivan answers a question about sealers that initially had him stumped. This article works through some answers if this problem ever arrives on your doorstep.
Rick Lobdell of Concrete Mystique Engraving in Nashville, Tennessee, is an artist, not a decorative concrete contractor. Still, in his career he has become known as a guy who can take concrete and turn it into an artistic canvas. He did just that for the Perkins home in Franklin, Tennessee.
A funny thing happened on the way home from the grocery store, says Troy Lemon, president of Cornerstone Decorative Concrete in Holland, Michigan. It all started when he and his son, Josh, stumbled upon an art studio in their own tiny village of Fennville.
ConScape Inc., a commercial, architectural and decorative concrete firm in Fort Worth, Texas, seemed like a godsend to the parishioners. With decorative concrete as its intervention, the company transformed part of the church’s landscape from a tired terrain into a radiant and peaceful panorama.
There is a famous paperback called "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. Many writers treasure it as a guide to writing clearly and succinctly while avoiding common grammatical errors. The handbook itself is a model of clarity.
