Incredible bathroom design and the before and after…. Brilliant!

Italian Carrara Bianco 12×12″ Honed perfectly matched with Italian Bardiglio Gray 12×12″ Honed…. never have too much Italian marble. The price will only ever go up and it will never go out of style.

Bardiglio 12×12″ and Bianco 12×12″ Honed…. Harlequin bathroom perfection by @athomewithalysia pictured on Instagram. It’s a great IG site with brilliantly designed rooms and the Pyramid Style napkins are a nice touch along with other videos (well worth checking out).

Most importantly with design renovation is the “before and after” everyone’s fan favorite and this does not hold back or consume 30 minutes getting there. It’s just amazing: Check out this  post with Bardiglio Gray 12×12″ and Bianco 12×12″ Honed marble tile before and after pictures.

Collection of Bardiglio Gray can be found online here.

Carrara Venato with Bardiglio Gray for a Softer take on the Harlequin

Perfectly installed and designed By Valerie Wheeler and it is called on her blog an English Kitchen Reveal

Bardiglio Gray Marble Sold here. Carrara Venato for the Bright white look to best enhance the room sold here.

Historically the Gray and White Harlequin is found in Europe South of the Italian Alps and the North is predominantly black and white. This is simply Geography. The Bardglio Gray used here and sold online at The Builder Depot is from Italy. The black Tile is Nero Marquina from Spain.

The Gray and white is subtle easy-on-the-eye look. The very best thing is that even when you go into Buildings in Europe that are over 500 years old with this floor, it still looks great. Therefore you never have to worry about remodeling in your lifetime! This is not a floor that will go out of fashion because it is steeped in so much history.

Calacatta Gold. Timeless. Stately. Refined.

Premium Calacatta Gold 5″ Hexagon Mosaic framed with thin strips of Marble. Legacy marble. Almost impossible to find this level of perfection. A slab of this quality costing over $20,000 a cubic foot and that is still in the mountain. Create a no frills marketing strategy and remove all middlemen we can deliver at a price others cannot without having to compromise on quality. (PS…. that’s how the competition competes they lower the quality, do not actually buy Italian Calacatta Gold or reduce the size and sell by the piece).

Calacatta Gold Backsplash.

Available online from The Builder Depot Calacatta Gold Collection (Price may change as this price reflects the price at the time of this post).

Harlequin Black and White Checked Marble Floor

Carrara Venato 12×12″ Polished and Nero Marquina 12×12″ Polished.

Carrara marble from the The Builder Depot helps create the luxury of Harlequin marble flooring without the cost by ordering direct from the quarries. From European Palaces to our homes it exudes luxury that reflects the ever increasing value of our homes and the important position they have in our life capturing so many memories. That’s a bit blah, blah, blah content. Quite frankly this look has been amazing the heck out of people for literally centuries and still does today. Look at these floors… WOW!!!

One of the most well known Harlequin floors is that of the famous Grand Trianon at the Palace of Versailles. This is best known as King Louis XIV’s rural getaway is perhaps most closely associated with Queen Marie-Antoinette. When the King decided to replace the disintegrating porcelain tile in the Trianon, he upgraded to Carrara Marble and Nero Marquina ensuring that the floor tile would last well beyond his lifetime. (Bit more historical fluffy content).

Classic and Modern….. Marble!

This is a simple design and using just three products. Carrara Bianco 6×12″ Honed, Nero Marquina 5/8″ Mosaic to create border on the right and around Carrara Venato 1×1″ Square Mosaic offering a brighter look to stand out around the shower.

While I cannot see the top of the shower, it would be nice if it also has the rain shower head on the top.

You can design classic and modern. Get the design right and you never have to worry about remodeling again…. my biggest fear! I would hate to have the “pink” bathroom tiles that I see getting ripped out of 1980’s homes, someone paid to install those and thought “what an awesome design… nope”. Or tiles with Vegetables on them in the kitchen.

Yet I have seen bathrooms with Carrara marble dating back to Roman times (and they are still impressive). Even less extreme examples over history the Carrara Marble bathrooms in the Plaza NYC and many other historical hotels across London dating back to the 1890’s.

Bathrooms over 100 years old and still looking beautiful…. and the traffic through these hotels over 100 years, yet the marble looks incredible.

That is what I want. Classic. Durable. Stand test of time. Never remodel again. A forever bathroom!!!

Bianco Carrara Collection…. lot matching.

Start of the lot matching process for an order mixed of many products

Adding more products per customers instructions

Another angle (why not very happy with this match)

I just loved the veining on this Bianco Carrara 3×6″ honed…. time for a close up 🙂

Our Bianco Carrara Collection; Customers place orders for bathrooms with multiple products on the order. This is normal for us and we inventory our own products in the same location we are communicating to you about your order.

We own our warehouse and our office is located in the same facility. This allows us access to the products. While this does not seem like a big deal…. it is! Most online companies (over 95%) do not have access to their inventory. They are either drop shipping or using a 3PL (third party warehouse). This has a huge number of problems, here are just two:

#1. Drop Shipping or using a 3PL warehouse to ship marble does not work because no one will check your order to see if it lot matches. It will just be packed by someone that an hour ago was packing tennis shoes, or T-Shits, they have no skill in natural stone. They are not trained to even look inside the box.

#2. The return policy will be painful. It is painful regardless this is marble it is heavy but a company that does not ship from its own facility will have huge penalties for returns 30-40% of the order, because the 3PL location cannot process it. It will just get thrown away and your penalty is the company simply writing it off and throwing it away.

We like to spend time going through lots and sometimes we achieve the impossible with a natural product. Here we have 18×18″ Carrara Bianco Honed, Bianco Carrara 3×6″, Baseboard Honed, Basketweave with Bardiglio dot, Herringbone 1×2″, Basketweave border along with 2×4″ Nero Marquina. The matching of this collection of Bianco products is excellent. A third party warehouse cannot do this. It cannot send you pictures.

This selection will create an impressive bathroom.

Calacatta Gold Penny Rounds

Part of our Italian Calacatta Gold Collection Penny Round Marble Mosaic pictured is Honed (or Matte finish) it is also available in Polished (or gloss) Finish.

I love that moment when you open new crates and see perfection. Not only just in the cut of the Penny rounds (which is amazing) but then the quality and then just $23.95 a Square Foot (as of Sept 2022…. probably $30.00 a Square Foot in 12 months…. inflation and a finite resource).

This grade is exported to be used in the most luxurious hotels in the world in a slab format, think bars, lobby’s, dramatic entrance on a massive scale. Huge blocks are cut and the largest importer from Italy of this marble (if you thought America you are wrong) is Saudi Arabia, the hotels the palaces the endless wealth of the oil rich nation is reflected in their love of luxury items.

The very best blocks are selected, from those the waste or smaller blocks they cannot use. The smaller blocks can be significant…. create decades of relationships with Italian suppliers to these palaces and we can get these perfect smaller blocks from that produce and cut shapes for mosaics from the best marble blocks in the world.

Calacatta Gold creating absolutely stunning bathrooms for over 2,000 Years…. and a product or bathroom will only increase in value overtime.

Amazing Calacatta Kitchen 🙂

This picture of Calacatta Gold 3×6″ Honed Backsplash from Instagram here is from July 2022.

The website where you can see this “incredible” makeover is here SimplySummerJenn it would have taken some over-ordering so you can select the look you want. If I wanted to re-create this backsplash I would over order by 20% possible 25% so I could pick through and create the exact look wanted. It did not install itself and it was not installed box-to-box like a ceramic. You are creating art with natural stone and you or the person you are working with then certainly the complexity of Calacatta Gold is not for you. Get it right, installed correctly and you have not just good but exceptional! Gold 🙂

I would recommend taking a look at the website for incredible pictures and a good read on a variety of subjects. This kitchen is a DREAM!

As with all our blog posts prices are subject to change (as eventually this post will become a decade old). This was posted during 2022 when inflation was impacting globally. Hopefully in the future inflation is under control again.

Carrara Venato creates shower of dreams…. Mine anyway :)

Yep. This is definitely a dream shower. Beyond a Five Start resort hotel.

It is an incredible installation glass doors yet to go on, but this does give us a better view of the marble. This is no accident in creating this masterpiece. The customer or installer (probably both) has placed the Venato 6×12″ Honed to spread out the veining to create the look they want. They added a Venato 1″ Hexagon honed to the two niches framed with the Carrara Venato 3/4″ honed pencil trim. (Nice touch)

Then on the floor and as a feature wall is the Carrara Venato 2″ Hexagon Honed and the main bathroom floor has the Carrara Venato 12×24″ Honed in a classic brick format.

This shows how well the marble matches when it is picked and packed by our marble experts no other company offers this service. That just one key difference to our business model. A USP to our business. We are not interested in huge volumes. We are focused on each individual customer as if these are our bathrooms.

This is not dumb packing at a 3rd party warehouse or low cost warehouse employees, these are skilled marble experts with decades of experience selecting the marble for your project. You are not ordering from people that have no access to the product. The actual product is right outside the door of our offices. We see it before it is shipped. We selected this lot. Our offices are not in some ivory tower with the marble in another state. Our product is all together with us under one roof. Very few companies operate this way.

A no frills marketing strategy helps keep our costs low. We do not have experts in marketing writing our blogs or taking pictures to the point that they are not realistic with the products our pictures are with an iPhone (not even the latest one). My English teacher would not have picked me to write this blog, but we do not want to pay for another resource. All resources are a cost. Costs have to be added to the square foot price of the product and in these inflationary times saving our customers money and perfect marble is more important to us than grammatical perfection. I am already making excuses for this post. Happy to change any mistakes if someone would point them out. Then we are all working together to keep the prices low 🙂

As with all our blog posts prices are subject to change (as eventually this post will become a decade old). This was posted during 2022 when inflation was impacting globally. Hopefully in the future inflation is under control again.

Carrara Venato Honed Bathroom

The incredible Carrara Venato used perfectly to create a shower classic instantly adding value to any home buying direct from the supplier The Builder Depot.

Keeping the number of SKU’s simple: A Carrara Venato 6×12″ wall tile with Nero Strip Hexagon shower floor tile and capped off with a simple pencil trim.

Not a complicated design but the 6×12″ has been arranged to maximum effect spreading out the veining and not just thrown on the wall box-to-box. Planning has paid off here.

The great thing I know about this shower, we can come back to this post in a decade and it will still look like a shower that I wish I had. That is when you know you have a great design. Timeless Classics. No need to ever remodel again (which once you have done it you do not want to do it again). This type of bathroom that sits in Hotels in London that have been around since the 1800’s or the Plaza in NYC with their timeless Carrara marble bathrooms. Installations over a hundred years ago and looks perfect today.

The bathroom will add value. Overtime the cost to create this same design will double, triple and so on. The design itself will not age and the owner gets to enjoy living in a 5 star hotel resort bathroom forever, all while the value of the bathroom appreciates in value. “Carrara Marble” bathroom is an incredible bonus feature when it comes to selling a home. Tomorrow or in fifty years.