Concrete is the most widely used construction material. If the mix design is right and worker skills are good, concrete serves the homeowners' needs for long periods of time with little or no maintenance. It can be molded easily into any shape, has excellent fire resistance, and is capable of great strength.
Using it as a decorative material takes advantage of all of its strengths and lets creative contractors push the limits of what concrete can look like.
Henry Ford once said, “You can have any color you want for your car so long as it's black.” In the past, that's been the concrete industry's attitude—plain concrete is good enough. Today, however, consumers favor colored finishes and anything else that inspired imaginations can design and build.
Unlike the production of Portland cement, where records show the total amounts of cement produced, no industry-wide statistics are kept about decorative concrete products. Despite the lack of information, however, decorative concrete is regarded as the fastest-growing segment of the concrete industry.
Believe it or not, color experimentation in concrete has revived interest in the material's natural color. Many specifiers now think that the color of Portland cement is perfect for decorative purposes.
For one project, Lance Boyer, owner of Trademark Concrete in Anaheim, Calif., says he broadcast stone aggregates with a top size of 4 to 5 inches onto the concrete surface prior to finishing. Then, using terrazzo grinders, he ground the surface to expose the aggregate and produce a surface with traction. He's also specified plain gray concrete with broken glass and ceramic tile pieces broadcast on the surface—again grinding the surface afterward to produce a decorative effect.
Another use of natural-colored concrete for flooring involves grinding and diamond-polishing surfaces to a high shine, which eliminates the need for sealers.
Plain gray concrete also is being used for casting indoor and outdoor concrete countertops with hard-troweled finishes, diamond-cutting patterns and 3-D relief in flatwork, special hand-tooled jointing details on slabs, and a wide variety of exposed-aggregate finishes on horizontal and vertical applications.
Park Boyer is the director of marketing for Cleveland-based Master Builders, which is working with liquid-dispensed integral colors in concrete. He's convinced that the colored concrete market is increasing because the “plain gray” concrete industry has done such a good job producing a durable product that doesn't scale or come apart under adverse conditions.
“Without good, functional concrete, there wouldn't be a decorative market,” Boyer says.
