From Slab to Sheet: How We Make a Decor
Inside the Pretone studio, where a quarried block becomes a surface you can specify by the hundred.
Every decor begins as an object: a slab of marble, a block of grey stone, sometimes a material we build ourselves in the studio. The job is to translate the soul of that object into a printable, repeatable, durable surface.
We scan at extremely high resolution, capturing not just colour but the way light falls into a pore or across a vein. That scan is then retouched by hand — removing the one flaw you'd never want repeated a thousand times while keeping the thousand flaws that make it real.
The emboss plate is engineered next, and this is where realism lives. For synchronised decors, the physical texture is aligned to the print within fractions of a millimetre so that sight and touch agree.
Only then does it become a laminate: layers of kraft paper, the decor, and a wear-resistant overlay, fused under heat and pressure into a single sheet. What began as a unique block becomes a surface anyone can build with — without exhausting the quarry.
Written by
Pretone Studio