Plano
A pale limestone that holds a large surface without a break.
Croatian architectural and building limestone, from the Adriakamen and Plano Lithos quarries.
- Compressive strength
- 111.2 MPa
- Water absorption
- 0.97 %
- Böhme abrasion
- 21.8 cm³/ 50 cm²
How it looks
- Colour
- near white, faint beige
Plano is close to white in the coarse finishes and a faint beige when polished. It has no veining, no darker fields and no direction the slabs have to be laid in.
That makes it a stone for large surfaces. Two hundred square metres of facade, or a floor through a whole storey, reads as one surface with no visible change from slab to slab.
Up close, sections through rudist shells show in the pale ground, bivalves from the Cretaceous that built this carbonate platform; most read between one and three millimetres, a few reach five centimetres across. The laboratory classes it as a recrystallised limestone of organic origin at 98 per cent calcite, which is what the hand reads as an even grain.
Tone does shift from block to block and with depth in the bench, and a coarse finish always looks whiter than a smooth one, because a textured face scatters more light. Next to timber, glass, concrete and steel it stays in the background.
One stone, nine finishes
We put polished and honed on cladding and interior floors: polished deepens the colour and brings up the veining, honed is smooth and matt. Outside, and anywhere a surface gets wet, it is sandblasted, bush-hammered or brushed, because those do not get slippery. We do all the finishing ourselves, at Plano.
- Raw block
- Before any finish
- Polished
- Mirror gloss, colour at its deepest
- Honed
- Matt and smooth, no glare
- Brushed
- Matt and smooth, no glare
- Sandblasted
- Finely rough, non-slip
- Bush-hammered
- Evenly pitted all over
- Sandblasted and brushed
- Sandblasted, then brushed
- Bush-hammered and brushed
- Bush-hammered, then brushed
- Coarse bush-hammered and brushed
- Coarse bush-hammered, then brushed
- Split-faced
- Split face, left as the stone broke
We send a sample of any finish on request. Photographs of the samples are in preparation.
Where it is used
- external and internal floors
- stairs, treads and risers
- pool copings
- wall copings
- terraces
- window sills
- wall cladding
- adhered and ventilated stone cladding
- fireplaces
- cut-to-size elements
Technical data
The figures are from the accredited laboratory’s report, which you can download below. Strengths are mean values across a run of specimens, as the standards require.
- Real density
- 2695 kg/m³
- Apparent density
- 2610 kg/m³
- Compressive strength
- 111.2 MPa
- Compressive strength after freeze–thaw
- 100.4 MPa
- Flexural strength
- 11.7 MPa
- Water absorption
- 0.97 %
- Absolute porosity
- 3.15 %
- Böhme abrasion
- 21.8 cm³ / 50 cm²
- Freeze–thaw resistance
- 25 cycles, 0.36 % loss
- Salt crystallisation
- 5 cycles, 0.74 % loss
- Calcite content
- 98.27 %
Technical documentation
The Declaration of Performance and the technical data sheet are sent on request.
Built in Plano
How it behaves over the years
Limestone darkens outdoors. How far and how fast depends on the aspect, on how close the planting is, and on how long the surface stays wet after rain: a north facade under trees patinates on a different schedule from a south-facing terrace.
These changes are on the surface only and do not affect the strength or the life of the stone. A professional clean lifts it and brings back most of the original appearance; in between, a product made for natural stone is enough.
Never use acid. Limestone is calcium carbonate, so acidic cleaners etch it, and a single pass leaves a dull mark that only refinishing the face will remove.
How does it hold up to winter outdoors?
It holds up, and that has been measured. After twenty-five freeze–thaw cycles the sample lost 0.36 per cent of its mass and was rated resistant, and its compressive strength still came in at 100 MPa afterwards, ninety per cent of where it started.
And salt air?
The same sample took five cycles of salt crystallisation for a loss of 0.74 per cent. It carries no sulphide sulphur either, which in a pale limestone is the first thing worth asking about: sulphides are what surface years later as rust staining.
Will every slab look the same?
No, as with any natural stone. Plano is among the more even ones, but tone shifts from block to block. If a surface has to read as a whole, we select its slabs from a single block. Tell us when you order, not on site.
Which finish belongs on a surface that gets walked on wet?
Sandblasted or bush-hammered. Both are textured and give grip, where polished and honed go slippery as soon as they are wet. The Böhme abrasion figure of 21.8 cm³ per 50 cm² applies whichever finish you choose, since what wears is the stone and not the treatment.
Where is Plano not the right choice?
On heavily trafficked public paving, by the sea, or anywhere that is salted in winter. It absorbs about one per cent of water, five times as much as Dolit, so for those surfaces we recommend Dolit.
Can it be cut to size?
Yes. We cut facade panels to the drawing and drill them for anchors, make treads together with their risers, and run moulded elements on the profiling machine. All of it in our own plant at Plano.
Get a quote
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