Dark Emperador marble tiles

The Dark Emperador is a dark brown coloured marble, with fine grain and some irregular and crossed lighter veinage. This is a very famous natural stone from Spain that has been used in the past years on several projects with considerable reputation.

However, the reality of the Dark Emperador is that there are too many variations that can be found in the market, where it is very hard to know what is a good quality Dark Emperador or not. For this reason, we find important to present you the stone, its extraction, transformation and commercialization reality.

Overall view about Dark Emperador tiles
There are a large number of companies, shops, retailers and other sources commercializing Dark Emperador tiles, with a considerable range of grades, prices and offers. It is very common to find medium grades (also known as commercial) available in the market. This variation of the Dark Emperador is easier to extract and there is more availability. Tiles is the most common type of Dark Emperador finished product that you can find in the market, with different sizes and finishings. But below we tell you more about the variations, finishings and tiles types.

Variations
There are many variations of Dark Emperador available in the market. To resume, we can say that there are in reality few variations that are all extracted in the same area, near Alicante – on the eastern part of Spain. There is the First grade, which is the highly selected Dark Emperador, more expensive but also with a more uniform background, less white vein and darker brown colour. We also have the Standard (or High grade), which is the grade right below the First, with a little bit less selection, more white vein but still a very uniform and darker coloured background. The price of this variation is more affordable. We have the commercial types, which have less selection, are cheaper but present some white vein and a less uniform background. Finally, we have the basic or lower grade, which is the cheapest type of Dark Emperador, with very limited selection and few uniformity in terms of colour, vein.

Tiles dimensions
There are many differente dimensions for tiles, depending on market, project, etc etc. However, there are some international standard dimensions to be considered:
60x60cm: standard size, but with a higher price due to slabs height limitation. This dimension gives more waste on the manufacturing, therefore price is higher.
60×40, 60×30, 30×30 or 40x40cm: standard dimensions, a bit smaller than the 60x60cm, easier to manufacture, therefore cheaper.

And any other cut-to-size or non-standard dimensions, such as 80×80, 100x50cm and so on.

Finishings
Despite being most commonly found in the polished form, the Dark Emperador can accept well different types of finishings. Below we present you some of the most common ones:
Polished: the preferential type of finishing, which enhances the unique deep brown colour of the Dark Emperador.
Aged/tumbled: gives a rustic and warm look to the stone
Honed: maintains the brown colour, but it presents less contrast between colours and elements.
Brushed: beautiful rough surface, but smooth and maintaining the brown colour.

For complete information about the Dark Emperador marble, you can visit the following source:
www.dark-emperador.com

Article written by: Joao Luis from Globalstoneportal