We are excited to share a blog written by my clients about their journey using Gauged Porcelain slabs for their Breathtaking Bathroom Remodel. This particular project, the clients were much more engaged in the entire process. The blog below is written by Brandon. A (Client)

My Journey Using Gauged Porcelain Slabs for a Breathtaking Bathroom Remodel by Brandon A.

When it came time to remodel my bathroom, I knew I wanted something extraordinary—something that would combine elegance, durability, and a modern edge. My wife and I had three musts for the project: 1) an upstairs washer/dryer, 2) soft floor lighting for midnight walks to the bathroom, and 3) continuous veining, like marble, for our shower tiles.

The solution to the marble aesthetic quickly became the most enchanting part of the process, and it’s what I’ll be focusing this blog post on: gauged porcelain slabs.

When I discovered gauged porcelain slabs, I immediately realized these are a game-changer in the world of home design. In this post, I’ll take you through my personal journey using these stunning, panel-sized tiles for a breathtaking bathroom transformation. From selecting the right materials to navigating the installation process, I learned valuable insights that I’m excited to share with anyone looking to elevate their own space.

Part 1: Sourcing Gauged Porcelain

The Take-aways

● Gauged porcelain panels are not just a beautiful design choice but also a highly functional option for homes with the budget to support them.

● Costs:

○ Materials: While gauged porcelain panels range from $800 to $2,000 per slab, the real costs of your project will be in site preparation, fabrication, and installation. These phases are crucial and often more expensive than the material itself.

○ Site Preparation: All studs and joists must be level and plumb within ⅛” over 10 feet. This can be a challenge not all contractors want to take on, adding time and expense to your project.

○ Fabrication: Fabrication costs range from $49/sq-ft to $200/sq-ft. There are very few fabricators with the training and experience to fabricate gauged porcelain correctly, so those who are skilled in this area charge a premium for their services.

● Gauged porcelain panels are available through retail storefronts like Floor & Decor, where DIY enthusiasts and lower-income buyers might be tempted by the product, not realizing the true costs and necessary safety practices for a proper installation.

● Due to the shortage of experienced gauged porcelain fabricators, failed installations occur when untrained installers don’t use proper techniques. Always ask your installer about their gauged porcelain training and certifications.

Introducing: Gauged Porcelain

Last April, I stayed at an apartment in New York City that featured a stunning slab as the back wall of the shower—no grout lines, just continuous veining. It was breathtaking. I knew right then that if I ever renovated my bathroom, this was the look I wanted. Six months later, my wife and I made the decision to redo our bathroom.

*A Manhattan shower feature wall with an infinity niche. Material unknown. Source: Instagram.*

Preparing for our new bathroom, my wife and I were walking through Floor and Decor. They have beautiful tiles that look just like marble, but none of them offer vein matching. In fact, around the globe, I’ve only found two companies that vein match tiles: the Endless Vein tile line by Kaolin in Australia and Endless Tile by Lavish in Italy. Neither is available in America.

One knowledgeable staffer at Floor and Decor offered: “If you’re looking for continuous veining, you should check out gauged porcelain panels. We have them at some Floor and Decor locations, but not here in the Denver area yet. You can also find them at Bedrosians.”

This suggestion from a kind F&D staffer would send me down a rabbit hole that would consume the next 8 months of my life as I became obsessed with gauged porcelain panels.

Initial Reactions

When I shared my intention to use gauged porcelain for our shower and a feature wall, my contractor admitted he had never worked with it before and emphasized that it required specialized care—something outside his expertise.

My designer had recently worked with gauged porcelain and loved it, but the fabricators she used—who specialize in porcelain—botched the installation. “You can go ahead with it, just avoid [this national installer],” she advised. “They messed up the install twice before getting it right on the third try, which delayed the project by three months.” This was disappointing news since [this national installer] is the only all-porcelain fabrication shop in my home state of Colorado. (I’m redacting their name because I didn’t personally have a bad experience with them.)

Pricing Part 1 - The Slabs

When I discovered that gauged porcelain panels weren’t available at Floor & Decor in Denver (update: they are now!), I embarked on a two-month journey to learn everything I could—who manufactures them, how they are imported, where they are distributed, and where I could find them locally. I found an incredible selection of colors online, but identify where to source them and how to price them was its own challenge. Here’s what I uncovered:

Manufacturer Retailers. A small number of manufacturers maintain their own retail storefronts in the USA:

● Porcelanosa makes XLight (47"x106") and XTone (63"x126") (transparent pricing)

● Cosentino makes Dekton (pricing through GC/fabricator only)

● Daltile makes Panoramic (pricing through GC/fabricator only)

● Francini makes Forte (pricing through GC/fabricator only)

● MSI Surfaces makes Stile

● Marazzi makes Marazzi Grande, only available in Dallas, TX

● Emil Ceramica is sold at EmilAmerica in Dulles (VA), Orlando (FL) , Ft Worth (TX), and Anaheim (CA).

○ It may also be available at local regional retailers. In Denver it can be sourced through Total Floors or Moderno Porcelain Works.

● FMG makes five brands, and their lines are sold through FMG's vertically integrated distributor/retailers Trans Ceramica (Chicago, Anaheim, and New York) and EuroWest (Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Francisco).

○ Ariostea High Tech by Iris

○ Maxfine by Iris

○ Porcelaingres by Iris

○ Sapienstone by Iris

○ Maximum by Fiandre

Wholesalers. Many manufacturers do not have retail storefronts, or at least not in the USA. And it can be complicated to find where to source their slabs. I live in Denver and found these lines of porcelain slabs available:

● Ascale by Tau is available through ESI and Stone Collection

● Infinity by Infinity Surfaces is available through Architectural Surfaces

● Neolith is available through Stone Collection

● Everstone by Atlas Plan through Glenrock (Colorado) and Cancos (New York)

● Laminum and Crossville is available at Crossville Studios

● Corian Endura by DuPont is listed on its website as available at many locations

Elusive Slabs. Many manufacturers I haven't been able to source in Denver at all. Many have stunning slabs, so I was disappointed they wouldn't be options for me. I put my favorite four on top.

● La Fabrica Ava is available at Cancos in the Tri-state area, but I haven't found other wholesalers/retailers.

● Florim

● Atlas Concord

● Maximus by RAK Ceramics

● Lapitec

● Reya Impax

● Epic Surface

● Antolini Tech

● Artekk

● Big Slabs by Nuovo Corso

● XLife Large Format by Cifre Ceramica

Retail turnkey. Some kitchen and bath stores will source, fabricate and install porcelain slabs. I’ve found five US-based companies that actually specialize in working with porcelain slabs:

● Moderno Porcelain Works

○ Moderno can source slabs from anywhere, but they also carry a private label brand called XTone, made for Moderno by Porcelanosa.

● Lusso Porcelain and Design

○ Locations in Kansas City and Omaha, Lusso works primarily with porcelain from Infinity Surfaces.

● Porcelain Source

○ Located near Livingston, NJ, Porcelain Source sells primarily porcelain from Fiandre.

● Porcetalia

○ Located near Atlanta, Porcetalia has a wonderfully transparent approach to slab and fabrication pricing.

● The Porcelain Slab Co.

○ Serving North Carolina and Virginia and distributing Laminam, in addition to Stonepeak Plane, Neolith, and Dekton.

Consumer Facing Retailers

● TileBar XL Porcelain Slabs by TileBar

● XL Porcelain Slabs by Floor and Decor (Available only in limited regions - not mine!)

● Magnifica Encore by Bedrosians - Bedrosians gives a 40% discount when selling direct to fabricators/contractors.

Navigating the pricing for these panels in the Denver market was frustrating. Slab prices aren’t listed on any website. Bedrosians was the only store that displayed prices in their showroom, and they hinted at a 30% discount for designers, contractors, and fabricators. However, their selection was quite limited.

Almost all of Colorado’s porcelain panels are sold through stone wholesalers, for whom porcelain is less than 5% of their business. This meant the wholesale representatives I talked with were uneducated about the product, and they refused to discuss pricing with me. They’d only discuss it with a fabricator, which I’d not yet secured. Are these slabs $10/sq-ft? $50/sq-ft? $100/sq-ft? I had no idea! And now I had to recruit a fabricator whom I wasn’t even paying yet to find out for me.

Fortunately I met one fabricator who offered to help me out. I poured through my list of manufacturers, wholesalers, and slab colors, and pointed him to various reps to call to get pricing. My fabricator got pricing that varied from $800/slab ($16/sq-ft) at Porcelanosa at the low end, to $2,000/slab ($40/sq-ft) from ESI for Ascale Tau at the high end. Shipping and A-frame charges were sometimes, only sometimes, added on. $500-$2000 for shipping, and $300-$500 for the A-frame.

For my seven slab project, after months of research, many site visits to slab houses, and coordinating the back and forth between my fabricator and a half-dozen wholesalers, I learned we were talking about a raw material price ranging from as low as $6,500 to as much as $16,000. That was reassuring. The lower end was affordable given my budget, but I’d soon learn that was only a tiny fraction of the total cost.

This model of price obfuscation is inherited from the natural stone world. Sourcing marble or quartz is also typically done through a fabricator or high end designer, so the process naturally weeds out DIYers or lower budget home-owners.

But natural stone slabs aren’t sold at Floor and Decor, whereas gauged porcelain is. And this introduces a fair bit of consumer confusion and Floor and Decor may not educate consumers on proper installation techniques.

Pricing Part 2 - The Fabrication

As I began searching for fabricators, Emil America connected me with an independent fabricator, Lance, who shared that he works with gauged porcelain about four times a year—not very frequently.

Next, Porcelanosa introduced me to a large Denver-based fabrication shop, let’s call them “Granite World,” telling me they were very reasonably priced. Porcelain makes up less than 5% of Granite World’s business, but they do fabricate it.

At first, my job included:

● 1 cladded shower with a niche, and window, and a bench

● 1 feature wall for two panels

● 1 53” coffee bar vanity with a sink cutout and backsplash

Lance priced this job at $37k, including materials. For the same project, Granite World priced the job at $34k.

I wanted to better understand pricing, and Granite World did offer me a fair bit of transparency.

● Their quartz fabrication is $50/sq foot.

● For porcelain, there’s an automatic 50% upcharge, bringing the cost to $75/sq ft.

● On top of that, I’d pay $10/sq ft for vertical applications and an additional $16/ft for any mitered edges.

Granite World’s quote didn’t add up based on the per-foot pricing they’d shared with me. It was much higher. When I sent them my square footage calculations and asked for clarification, they simply replied:

Thank you for the opportunity to work with you on your project, it has been good getting to know you over the past week or so. After further consideration, I don’t know if we are going to be the right fit for what you are looking for.

We appreciate you reaching out, and wish you the best of luck with your project.

So, they were out. (Or, I was?) Apparently I asked too many questions!

For comparison, Porcetalia in Georgia, which sells and fabricates only gauged porcelain (similar to Moderno’s model), offers shower walls and feature walls, installed, for $49 per sq ft, compared to Granite World’s $85. Unfortunately for me, I don’t live in Georgia.

*Porcetalia’s pricing for materials, fabrication and installation of gauged porcelain. Source:* *porcetalia.com/pricing/*

Pricing Part 3: Preparation - the Hidden Costs

I’ll discuss how I met the fabricator I eventually worked with, Adam Christiansen, later on. For now, it’s worth noting that Adam required me to hire someone he trusted to prepare the shower before he arrived. Honestly, I would have fought a wooly mammoth to have Adam on my project, so this wasn’t a deal-breaker for me—but was it truly necessary?

Yes. In order for a gauged porcelain panel to be installed on a surface, that surface can have no more than ⅛” deviation over a 10’ span. Now that’s plumb! Everything needs to be plumb, level square and flush. My exterior shower wall, which was original to the house built in 1993, was out of plumb everywhere, and in some places by as much as 1.5”! Even the new framing that had just been stood up days earlier with special attention to make sure it was plumb was still off by more than the allowable ⅛” per 10’.

Adam brought on his Denver based pal Austyn Hunt from Hunt Tile and Stone to apply a custom foam shower pan, waterproofing, and make sure every wall was acceptably plumb with the right substrate applied before Adam showed up on site.

Austyn used a laser level to assess how out of plumb each 18” segment of each stud was, then applied a specifically sized and color coded piece of foam to bring it into plumb.

When thinking about the cost of your gauged porcelain project, factor in the preparation work that goes into it. But here’s the real point of concern for the industry: in my months of research speaking with wholesalers and fabricators, not one person mentioned this required prep work until Adam did. I fear that in many cases, untrained installers are doing gauged porcelain installations without properly preparing the site. Maybe this is why I often see @PorcelainPanelPro Nate Parsons posting things like this on social media:

A comment on Facebook from porcelain fabrication expert Nate Parsons, 10 year gauged porcelain fabricator and owner of the Porcelain Slab Co. May 3, 2024. I get the sense this remark, and many more like it, comes from a place of genuine concern. Many installers are not following best practices, and a few years later, those panels crack or fall off.

Part 2: Working with Your Fabricator

The Take-aways

● Use software that you already own to plan your bookmatches in advance. Modify your wall framing designs to avoid using small fractions of a panel. Ideally, the walls you have use each panel, and have 3” of panel left over at the end.

● Again, plan for 3” less than you have on the height and width of each panel. Your fabricator will need this buffer to make sure the printed vein-matches properly align from one panel to the next.

● If you are paneling a wall that extends farther than the width of your panel, you should consider flipping your panel to a horizontal orientation, or else understand the tradeoffs and mitigation possibilities should you choose to stick with a vertical orientation. If your shower bench is longer than your panel width, for instance, to get a perfect vein match, you’d need to add a grout seam on the bench.

● Ask your fabricator if their miter machine takes off part of the panel, and how that will affect your vein matches.

● Use infinity niches in your porcelain panel shower. They look better, give you more storage space, and require your fabricator to make fewer cuts and miters.

● Only limited surfaces of your niche can vein match with the surrounding surfaces. You can choose to match (a) the side returns, (b) the top and bottom returns, or (c) the back panel. You cannot veinmatch two of the three. If you have a preference, let your fabricator know.

● Gauged porcelain standards require that holes cut in the slab are at least 2” away from a joint. Keep your plumbing (e.g., valves, diverters, showerheads, and body sprays) or any other infrastructure that protrudes from the wall more than 2” away from your shower niche, or any return or joint.

● LED strips are a great way to highlight accents in your gauged porcelain installation, like a shower niche, under a shower bench, or feature wall. Select your LED colors (I recommend 3500K white), purchase the materials, get it wired, and coordinate installation with your fabricator in advance of the installation. Aim to have the top of the niche below eye level for the shorter person in the shower, if possible. This will ensure the LED stays hidden from sight.

How I Met Adam

After striking out with fabricators in Colorado, I turned to the internet forums to ask who out here specialize in porcelain fabrication. One kind fabricator suggested, “Look up Adam Christiansen. He does a lot of gauged porcelain training, and might be able to help you find someone local.”

Adam runs Lusso Porcelain and Design, a gauged porcelain distributor and installer with locations in Kansas City, Omaha, and Boise. He also runs Tile Nation, which trains tilers how to fabricate and install the gauged porcelain. I spent a few hours watching his videos on YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, as well as those of one of his Tile Nation partner, Christopher Rachel. These guys were legit. At 8am the next morning, I gave Adam a call.

I explained to Adam the project I wanted to do, and that I couldn’t find a qualified porcelain fabricator in the Denver area. “Could you search your rolodex for someone I could call?” I asked.

Adam offered to call people he knew in Denver, but ultimately came up empty handed. He surprised me by offering to make the 9 hour trek from Kansas City to do my job himself. Admittedly, I was starstruck, and of course I gleefully accepted. The collaboration had begun.

Scoping the Project

When Adam and I started working together, I sent him panel-by-panel designs for my project.

We wanted to bookmatch in a particular corner, between the Swiss Cheese wall (Adam named this because of all the body sprays) and the Window wall. The rest of the layout would flow from there.

Having this design also helped me communicate my hopes and expectations for the project to Adam so neither of us would be surprised later. For instance, the design included:

● One niche (a second was added later)

● Shower bench

● Dual shower heads

● Body sprays, shower wand

● Window

Using Keynote on Mac

I used Keynote software on Mac to make and iterate on our design and layout. Keynote is just Apple’s version of PowerPoint or Google Slides.

I made everything to scale by setting the pixel dimensions for each panel, wall, window, and niche. The slab manufacturers’ websites typically provide accurate photos of all their colors I could copy and paste into my Keynote file. From there, we were off to the races. Keynote also made it very easy for us to flip, rotate, cut and move panels to explore various design options. When we had something we liked, we sent it to Adam and our designer for review. I could imagine in some cases it would be the designer rather than the homeowner doing this. As I mentioned early, I’d become a bit obsessed with gauged porcelain and wanted to be involved in every detail.

Designer

Adam’s distribution company, Lusso, distributes gauged porcelain panels manufactured by Infinity Surfaces. This was a wonderful coincidence, because I love Infinity’s colors. I was originally drawn to Infinity by their Ocean Blue color.

*Bookmatched Ocean Blue gauged porcelain slabs from Infinity Surfaces*

Selecting colors is outside of my comfort zone, but we were lucky to be working with an incredible Denver based designer, Bonnie Bagley-Catlin. The theme of our bathroom is a relaxing spa, and we were leaning heavily into calming brown tones. Bonnie ultimately helped us select Calacatta Oro for our shower and Royal Peacock for our feature wall. Adam pointed out that these two colors share the same brown/gold hues, which we are playing off of for the wood stains and the champagne bronze Delta fixtures.

Royal Peacock and Calacatta Oro colors by Infinity Surfaces.

Feature Wall: Selecting a Bookmatch Layout

Our two-panel Royal Peacock bookmatch was 82”w x 96”h, so we needed to cut a fair amount from the edges. Cutting edges for a bookmatch isn’t arbitrary. There are an infinite number of unique bookmatch patterns you can end up with based on the cuts you choose and how you orient the slabs.

We used Keynote software to explore 24 different permutations of slab orientation and cut locations to select the bookmatch design that was best for us. We wanted something that looked like snow capped mountains, because we’re in Colorado. And we were on the lookout for mysterious faces, bugs, monsters, and lady parts that could show up in the bookmatch, sometimes small, sometimes big, as we made our selection

Shower Walls Design

Our shower design included his/her shower heads on opposite walls. We wanted something beautiful to look at in each of those positions, so we used that to inspire our Calacatta Oro slab placement decisions.

We knew we would get to play with an amazing bookmatch to kick off the layout. We could either place it in a corner or in the middle of a wall. All four of our walls were interrupted in the center, either by a window, niche, or shower head and body sprays. So we decided a corner bookmatch was best for us. Once you have the bookmatch, the rest of the layout flows from there.

It turned out that placing that bookmatch in the corner next to our main shower head meant we’d have a beautiful display of colors where the second shower head would be placed. Adam calls coincidences like these “happy little accidents,” and taught us that they happen all the time with gauged porcelain. We’d see this again and again throughout the process.

Niche Design

A shower niche is a requirement for any high end shower. For gauged porcelain, however, a large hole like a niche adds fragility both before and after installation. To address this, fabricators will cut the sections to the left and right of the niche into separate pieces, and apply them with a grout joint (⅛” - 1/16”) or tight seam (1/32” with epoxy). (Note that tight seams require specialty equipment that your fabricator may or may not have. That’s OK, a grout joint is fine.)

One of the aesthetic advantages of using gauged porcelain panels over normal or large format tile is the groutless, seamless look. So adding these seams immediately detracts from the pizazz factor you’d like to get with gauged porcelain.

Adam introduced us to an alternate approach to the niche that’s both easier for the fabricator and looks better for the homeowner and provides a large shelf area: an infinity niche.

*Example of an infinity niche made from gauged porcelain (not our shower)*

The Take-away: Have your contractor frame your niches as infinity niches, meaning they go wall to wall. This reduces grout joints and miters in your porcelain installation.

For our installation, it wasn’t possible to do infinity on both sides of the niche because one side butted against the door jam. An infinity niche on one side also works, and gives us half the benefit.

If you live in a cold weather area like we do, you might also hear from your contractor that building a niche into an exterior wall is a bad idea. If the niche is truly best suited for that wall, you can always build your wall out an extra three inches, then you have your insulation behind the niche.

Vein Matching Your Shower Niche

A shower niche has 5 pieces of tile: top and bottom returns, side returns, and the back panel. You can’t match the veining of all 5 pieces to the surrounding areas. For the pieces you chose not to match directly, your fabricator will use remnants from your project, and might find some where the vein flow is pretty close.

The Take-away: On your shower niche, you can either veinmatch the side returns, the top and bottom returns, or the back panel. If you have a preference, let your fabricator know before the installation process begins.

Horizontal or Vertical: Selecting Your Slab Orientation

Gauged porcelain slabs can be oriented vertically or horizontally. For our shower and feature wall, we chose to orient them vertically. In the shower, this decision had one notable trade-off: the bench.

For a shower bench, in an ideal situation, you pick up two aesthetic wins:

The veins from the wall above continue onto the top surface and the front surface of the bench.
The bench does not have a seam.

If your bench is longer than the width of a slab, the only way you can achieve both 1 and 2 is to orient your slabs horizontally. Our shower bench is located on the longest wall and spans 85”, which is wider than the 63” panel. But we’re using a vertical slab orientation, so we had to choose between 1 and 2, and we chose not to have a seam. This means we need to cut an 85” lengthwise span off another panel.

Adam was committed to getting as close to a vein match as possible, which he does by creating a “story stick”. This is when he takes his wood template and marks where the veining would most naturally match.

*Adam’s marks where the veins from the wall will meet the bench on his wooden template. He calls this a “story stick.”*

Adam then laid the story stick onto an uncut panel to see which 85” run would most closely match veining on the wall. He was able to find a very close match. Another happy little accident.

The Take-away: If you are paneling a shower that extends farther than the width of your vertical panel, you should at least consider flipping your panel to a horizontal orientation, or else understand the tradeoffs and mitigation possibilities should you choose to stick with a vertical orientation.

Planning for the Installation Process

We knew months before construction where we wanted that primary bookmatch, but we hadn’t thought about how that might affect the framing of our shower.

*Two panels total 126” and need to span 125.5” of shower surface.*

Once Adam arrived on site, we realized that a two panel section of our walls measured 125.5”. Naively, I thought this was perfect because each panel is 63” wide, so we’d get 126” out of the two. Adam pointed out that the laser print on this run of panels was off by ¾” in opposite directions for panels A and B, so we would have to cut both those off to achieve our bookmatch. That meant we were going to lose 1.5”, and ultimately be 1” short of the wall. Had I known to consider this when framing the shower, I would have made the shower a two inches narrower.

Even with the ½” we’d win back because of our butt joint, we’d still be ½” short.

This was one moment where Adam’s brilliance as a porcelain fabricator really shined. His first insight was that our problem was actually at the far end of the wall, where a ½” substrate had been added to frame a return. Adam could remove that substrate and replace it with a ¼” substrate, then we’d be… closer.

Next, he noticed something critical about the edge where the laser print was off by ¾”. It was also almost entirely without veining. The only spot that had a vein match would be covered by the bench. Another happy little accident! This meant we didn’t have to be as judicious about cutting off that ¾” as we normally would, and all the sudden, our bookmatch would work and our panel would reach the end of the wall.

The Take-away: While Adam was relieved we’d hit the end of the wall, it was a very close call. He shared that a fabricator’s comfort zone is having 2-4” extra. If the shower framing had been designed with this in mind, it would eliminate these close calls. From the perspective of a homeowner or designer, if your panel is 63”x126”, consider your usable space to be 60”x123” so your fabricator has room to accommodate printing issues that will inevitably occur.

Vein Matching with a Miter Joint

Our coffee bar was meant to be a vein matching wonder. There would be three surfaces, plus an overhang, that would come from specifically planned remnants of the shower walls panels.

Four gauged porcelain panels come together to form a 4-way bookmatch. This can be deployed for a corner countertop with backsplashes on two sides.

All of Adam’s cuts are made by hand, either using score and snap method or a handheld wet saw. He also miters by hand with a series of diamond polish blades. Porcelain slab miters are typically quark miters with a 47o bevel on each piece. This meant the mitered edge between the Coffee Surface and Overhang would vein match perfectly.

Adam was the only fabricator I spoke with who would fabricate by hand. Everyone else I spoke with fabricates by machine. Adam taught me that most machine made miters will cut off ¾” of the pattern in order to make the miter. So if you’re mitering two edges together using a machine, you can lose 1.5” and cause your vein match to be noticeably off.

The Take-away: Ask your gauged porcelain fabricator if their miters take off part of the panel, and how that affects vein matching.

Plumbing

Did you know that gauged porcelain standards indicate holes should never be closer than 2” to a joint? Neither did I, neither did my plumber. We deliberately placed our on/off valve under the niche. Fortunately, there was three inches of space in between, but that wasn’t by design, and it was a close call.

I can imagine a future when porcelain fabricators have a one pager, like the one I made up below, to hand off to GCs at the beginning of a project to ensure such details conform to gauged porcelain requirements.

The Take-away: Keep your plumbing fixtures (or any other infrastructure that requires a hole in the porcelain) more than 2” away from any joint.

LED Lighting

Modern luxury showers typically have LEDs to light dark corners, and LEDs play very nice with a gauged porcelain shower. For our shower, we worked with Adam to install a waterproof LED in each niche, and under the bench. For the niche, Adam recommended we install them toward the front so it’s lighting our shampoo bottles, rather than casting shadows of them onto the floor.

For our shower bench, we’ll have one long LED that goes underneath toward the front and spans the full length of the bench. Our bench goes wall-to-wall, but for floating benches that do not go wall-to-wall, Adam recommends side return LEDs to light under the two sides of the bench as well.

For a shower, the LED you source should be rated IP-67, IP-68, or IP-69, indicating they are waterproof. IP-67 is all you need, as IP-68 and IP-69 are capable of being submerged in water, which would be overkill for a shower implementation.

You’ll want to source and acquire your LED channel and LED strip lights before your fabricator gets onsite, and address whether your fabricator is comfortable doing the installation, or if they prefer to rely on the electrician. The electrician should have already wired the shower with the appropriate low voltage wiring, with an end sticking out right where the light is going to go.

Typically, an LED implementation requires a power supply (some people call it a transformer) between the light switch and the LED lights. This LED Driver and Dimmer from Schluter features a power supply built-in to the dimmer switch.

LEDs can come as either white, multi-colored (“RGB”), or both. Some RGB LED strips advertise they can do white too, but in reality try to replicate white by turning on red, green and blue at the same time. I’ll save you the hassle, it does not look white. Be cognizant of your LED color and whether you want them dimmable when you purchase them. We chose dimmable, white LED strips with a color temperature of 3500K. They are awesome.

We are also using an LED strip placed in a mud-in ceiling channel above the feature wall to highlight the Royal Peacock bookmatch, as well as three dimmable, IP-67 rated puck lights to provide uplighting.

The Take-away: LED strips are a great way to highlight accents in your gauged porcelain installation, like a shower niche, shower bench, or feature wall. Select your LED colors, purchase the materials, get it wired, and coordinate installation with your fabricator in advance of the installation.

Part 3: Installing Gauged Porcelain Panels

The Take-aways

● Ask your fabricator how they prepare for broken panels. Will they have an extra panel or two pre-ordered and on-site? Can they be returned if they’re not used? Is the cost burden of extra panels baked into their fabrication costs?

● If your project will require tile transition pieces like a Schluter jolly, select your color and buy your materials in advance. For a 6mm porcelain slab, you want to use a Schluter jolly size 80, but those are often available only by pre-order from Home Depot, Lowe’s or Floor and Decor. You can also use size 100, but the 80s will look better.

● Expect corners cut directly into the porcelain to be rounded rather than a 90o angle. This provides both short term protection during transport and installation, and long term stability.

● Gauged porcelain panels are not “big tiles” and should not be used for DIY projects. They are incredible technology that requires appropriately trained individuals to install.

While Adam was onsite templating, fabricating, and installing the porcelain panels for our job, I had the honor of being his apprentice. I’ve been looking forward to this for months! And it did not disappoint.

Adam set up a cutting table in my garage. His equipment took most of the space where two cars would normally be parked. The first step was getting the panel from his trailer onto the table, which was not for the faint of heart.

Grab and Lift!

Adam uses tools originally developed for rock climbing called Grabos.

*A Grabo is an electric vacuum suction device that can be used to climb a flat surface, or lift heavy, flat objects.*

We stuck two Grabos to a porcelain panel in his trailer, one on either side. He grabbed one, I grabbed the other. Then “1, 2, THREE!” And we’d lift 150 lbs of precious, fragile gauged porcelain a few inches off the ground and walk it carefully to the foam covered table in the garage.

This process would repeat after the panel was cut to template, then we’d take it upstairs to the installation site. This was hard work and anxiety inducing. Breaking a fabricated panel would mean lost time, and lost money on replacing it.

Fortunately for me, Adam sells and installs panels. So he brought extras just in case, but I didn’t have to buy them if we didn’t use them. Typically, fabricators don’t also sell panels, so they have to buy extras for your project in case any break along the way.

The Take-away: Ask your fabricator how they prepare for broken panels, and who carries the cost burden.

When we move the panel upstairs, we apply a suction rack to give the panel additional stability. For full panels, we use a rack with two horizontal bars and two vertical bars, supporting each edge. For this cut panel, we used a single rack bar.

Big Panel / Little Panel

On Monday and Tuesday, Adam templates and fabricates the four largest pieces for the installation. Three of the four were almost an entire slab. We carry them off the truck and onto his table where he cuts the edges to a perfect fit. Then, we carry them into the house, up the stairs and install them on the wall.

These panels are so heavy that Adam says, “After two panels in a day, we call it. We can be proud of that work. Bad things can happen on the third panel.”

By the time we get beyond those big panels, I think we are done with the hard part. Boy am I wrong!

Next comes the smaller pieces: five pieces that make up each of the two niches, the bench is three pieces, the window returns include four pieces. There are the pair of pieces that fit above and below each niche, the bench, and the window. Then there are door jam returns, the wraps, and the three sides of the curb… That’s more than 30 pieces!

Adam measures each section meticulously, then runs downstairs to cut the corresponding piece, only to run it back upstairs to see if it’s the perfect fit. Inevitably, he needs to shave a bit off this edge or that, and back downstairs he goes.

Once it fits, each of the four sides gets polished or mitered or both using a series of polishing pads with various grit. Some pieces need holes burrowed into it for a plumbing extrusion like a diverter or a showerhead.

While these smaller pieces are easier to carry than the large one, the process is time consuming. With all the back and forth to measure, cut, measure, and refine each piece, then tape it into place and eventually install it, I can appreciate why fabricators upcharge for a niche and bench. I wasn’t timing him, but I bet Adam spent 16 hours across the four big pieces that would make up about half of our square footage, followed by 40 hours on the next half of the square footage.

The truth is there was no easy part of the process. Adam’s grit and determination to get through it was consistent. During the big pieces, he was animated and talkative, but it was taking a toll on the body. When it came to the smaller pieces, his headphones were on. He was focused and in the zone.

Templating

For each wall, Adam would lay wooden strips along each edge to make a template. For my shower walls, he’d also lay the strips around each plumbing fixture and mark it for an additional cut.

Troweling Thinset (or Bosti-set)

A thinset is troweled twice before the gauged porcelain is adhered to the substrate. The thinset goes both on the back of the porcelain, and on the substrate. That’s called a “double butter” thinset application. In both cases, it’s applied in one direction (horizontal or vertical), and the same direction on both the slab and the substrate.

Before troweling the slab, Adam would use a sponge to apply water to the back of the porcelain. It’s a thirsty material, so without that, it would absorb the water from the thinset, rendering the thinset less effective. (page 21)

*Bosti-set is applied to a wall before the gauged porcelain panel is applied.*

After adhering the porcelain to the wall, Adam would manually move the porcelain up and down or side to side, opposite of the orientation of the troweled thinset, to ensure it was completely covered. This also lets him set the panel exactly where he wants it. Next, he uses a vibrating tool to finish that thinset application process.

*Adam uses a vibration tool to flatten thinset into place.*

Edges

Edges typically have one of four destinies:

Hit a neighboring substrate or panel as a the butt joint or return
Be visible as a polished edge
Hit a neighboring porcelain edge as a mitered joint
Return into a tile transition piece like a Schluter jolly

The Take-away: If your project will require tile transition pieces like a Schluter jolly, select your color and buy your materials in advance. For a 6mm porcelain slab, you want to use a Schluter jolly size 80, but those are often available only be pre-order from Home Depot, Lowe’s or Floor and Decor. You can also use size 100, but the 80s will look better.

*Adam polishes an edge of Infinity Calacatta Oro*

*Adam tapes together two edges with 45o miter edges to make a 90o angle*

*Schluter’s greige (“TSBG”) jolly color was our selection for Infinity’s Calacatta Oro. It was only available in-store in size 100. Size 80 would take a week to arrive after ordering.*

Corners

If you inspect a cut corner of your porcelain slab carefully, you should notice that it is not cut at a 90o angle. This is deliberate. Like an eggshell, a curved porcelain corner is much stronger and less susceptible to breaking than a 90o angle.

When an angle is cut directly into porcelain, standards require that it’s cut as a rounded angle rather than 90o, which would be susceptible to breaking.

Adam cut these rounded corners in my garage, then after getting them upstairs and installed, he tightened them a bit so they’re closer to 90o. Having the curvature keeps the porcelain safer, even on the 200’ walk from my garage to my bathroom where it’s being installed.

This only applies to corners that are cut into a single piece of gauged porcelain. If the corner is made by joining two pieces of gauged porcelain together, you can have your 90o angle.

The Take-away: Expect corners cut directly into the porcelain to be rounded rather than a 90o angle. This provides both short term protection during transport and installation, and long term stability.

Building a Vanity with Integrated Sinks

The most functional part of our gauged porcelain installation is the vanity. It stretches 117” across with 6” of vertical porcelain exposed in front. In the back, it runs straight back to the window.

The vanity includes two integrated sinks, where “integrated” in this context means they are ALSO made from the same gauged porcelain, matching the shower.

Conclusion

In the end, my dream project was just that. I’ve been using the bathroom for a month now and couldn’t be happier. I wish you the best of luck on your gauged porcelain journey!

Discover the world of Gauged Porcelain through the unique perspectives of my clients