Our New Profiles Tool Makes Natural Stone Design Easy

Stone visualizer home design tool for natural stone

Online Design Tool Makes Choosing The Right Natural Stone Easy

READY TO GET INSPIRED?

The free online home design tool from Espinoza Stone brings your stone designs to life with just a few clicks.

Picking the right stone can be big challenge for homeowners and their designers. There is no standard name for many types of natural stone as every quarry, fabricator and yard uses different names for what can essentially be the same stone. When you add the wide variety of stone mixes that exist on the market, the stone selection process gets even more murky. Most stone design centers have small sample boards, tiny brochure pictures, sample walls or worse, chopped stone on pallets.

It’s just not easy for most folks to look at a pallet of chopped or thin veneer stone and visualize how it will look on their home.

Compare stone types and styles easily with your colors

Our Profiles® app helps you visualize different cuts and types of stone on your home. With a few clicks you can view our natural stone alongside a wide variety of paint, stucco and roof colors.  Our team has assembled a large natural stone catalog rendered from pictures of real stone. This makes it possible for you to get an accurate idea of how your stone selection will look alongside the paint, stucco and roof colors you like.

Online stone design tool visualizer

Customize your designs.

Use one of our 10 pre-loaded home elevations or upload your own rendering and drawings to get a realistic comparison of our different stone cuts and varieties. The goal is to increase your comfort level and make the stone selection process easier to visualize. The Profiles tool will keep track of every color and stone type you select for your design and allows you save your designs.

Profiles stone design visualizer

Give our Profiles tool a try.

Our Profiles© tool is live and can be found online at the Espinoza Stone website.  Get inspired, be creative and have fun bringing your stone designs to life.

Why Natural Stone Is A Sustainable Design Choice

Sandstone Slabs

Sustainable design starts with stone

Georgetown Cave Stone Chopped

Designing structures that are beautiful and sustainable is a movement that is growing. Many new materials and design options are available for your project but natural stone is a great way to add sustainable beauty and unique character to your home or commercial build.

Sustainable Design is a focus on getting more out of our natural resources. It’s a focus on limiting a building’s impact on our environment.

Design and construction of low impact and environmentally friendly buildings requires planning at the beginning of your design process but the returns from building green are worth the extra effort.

Here are 5 good reasons why stone is a sustainable design choice for your home or commercial project.

Limestone Wall Cladding

Stone is Natural

Stone is a product of the earth and mother nature’s original green building material. Natural stone requires no materials or resources to create and is in abundant supply. Stone is extremely versatile because of it’s many different textures, colors and physical characteristics. These colors, textures and characteristics make every stone installation unique.  Natural stone has no toxins or chemicals, ensuring that one element of your home environment will be safe and healthy. New commercial building construction that uses natural stone regional to a project or uses salvaged or reclaimed stone are the most common ways stone contributes to LEED points under the Materials & Resources section.

Custom Limestone columns and cladding

Stone is Recyclable

Stone is 100% recyclable and can be used many ways after it’s harvest from a quarry bed. Using recycled stone can save the water, energy and other resources used to generate new building products from raw material sources. Just a few uses for recycled stone include: fill, concrete mixture, landscaping, statuary, retaining walls, fertilizer, walkways and reuse on new construction. ASTM testing should be performed on recycled stone prior to its use in structural applications. The Natural Stone Council published a wonderful case study on ways natural stone can be reused in construction designs and in industry.

Recycled limestone

Stone is Durable

Stone is a very durable material that will stand up to years of use in a patio or age beautifully as an exterior covering. When you chose stone, you guarantee less material replacement and repairs over time. Stone tile flooring will withstand the high traffic of patios, kitchens and bathrooms for decades.

Stone may cost more than some material options, but it will outlast other products and reduce ownership costs when compared to materials that must be replaced and repaired over time. Interior and exterior Limestone applications are considered to be lifetime products that can last the entire useful life of a building according to a study by the National Association of Homebuilders.

Custom Limestone columns

Stone is Easy to Maintain

Stone will last for years with proper maintenance and care. While some natural patina coloring can develop on exterior building stone, this is easy to remove with simple water and brush cleaning if desired.  While you may elect to seal your interior stone, many exterior applications do not require sealants.

Our Stone is Quarried and Manufactured Responsibly

The quarry business has changed with advancements in technology. Innovations in extraction and fabrication methods have led to increased efficiency and lower costs for stone products. There are many more stone products being produced in quarries at an affordable price point. Stone is a more viable option for your home than ever. From water treatment and recycling programs to more energy efficient automated fabrication processes, the stone industry gets greener every year. The Natural Stone Institute curates a massive library of informational articles on the benefits of using natural stone and the relatively low environmental impacts of stone quarrying compared to other building materials like timber.

 

Please check out our Espinoza Stone website for more information about the myriad of stone products we produce at our 5,000 acres of Texas quarry operations.