Cast Stone Manufacturing

Cast Stone Manufacturing
February 11, 2019 Marmelade-GF974

It is a fact that many homeowners, given the opportunity, would love to have a home like this, that actually resembles a mansion built in Europe hundreds of years ago, out of stone.

And as you know, most of those homes are still standing today, which means this home should be around for quite a while. This home, by the way, was built out of manmade limestone, which differs from natural limestone in that it is more durable, more cost effective, and it’s easier to work with. This is actually cast stone, and the work is the responsibility and the product of a Dallas based company called Stone Legends.

And although the company is based in Texas, their handy work can be found in states all across the country. Their clients include Fortune 500 giants, and a wide range of celebrity people like Garth Brooks, Thomas Kinkade, Rusty Wallace, and Dale Jarrett, among many, many others. Richard Carey: Cast stone was a dead art. It’s been around for about 2,500 years, but for some reason, it didn’t make the cut somewhere along the way.

Today it’s considered one of the primary design products, it’s elements of the building, columns, balustraudes, staircases, moldings, entablatures on the building, entries, fireplaces, it’s on the floor, it’s on the walls. What I saw was a consuming market that was hungry for something that would personalize and make their homes look special; their own added touch to it.

And so the cast stone made it possible for say, the average person, to have a little piece of a castle all his own. We get to put a lot of time into one form and then use the form again and again and again. Therefore we don’t have to shape each piece individually, but we can actually use the form to help us do the shaping. We’re using very small, thumb nail size implements to tool the material when we bring it out of the forms. That way any molding lines, or anything, are taken out. The fact is that in many cases cast stone will outlast limestone because limestone is a calcium based glue and it erodes over time with acid rains and so forth. And the cast stone seems to hold up. There are examples of it that are over 1,000 years old.

The best way I could describe it to you is that when you were a child playing on the beach, and you packed that bucket full of sand, and you flipped it over, I bet you can remember seeing the patent numbers on the bottom of the bucket. That’s what kind of detail you can pull DL: A behind the scenes look at the magic of what can be created in cast stone as carried out by the artists at Stone Legends. I’m Doug Llewelyn, reporting from Dallas.