Ventilated facades: focusing on outdoor coverings

One of the company’s recent main novelties, the new collections of ventilated facades trace an important turning point in Lithos Design‘s production.
Mostly focused on indoor wall and floor coverings, the company decided to widen its range of products also creating exterior wall claddings.
With no doubt, the passage from indoors to outdoors was deeply challenging: many were the aspects to deal with, in particular starting to think in a completely different way. Indeed, ventilated facades mean a new way of conceiving claddings and the same creative process leading to their new decorative patterns had to follow paths the company had never explored yet.

Why ventilated facades?
What the Company’s Research and Development Department desired the most was to help create healthy spaces where dwellers and guests may comfortably live. Expert of stone and sensitive to inhabitants’ wellbeing, the Company’s R&D Dept. desired to find a kind of building facade that could both guarantee a high-quality living and fully increase the positive properties of stone. For this reason, the choice was for ventilated facades that are characterized by a mechanical anchoring system that allows to create a ventilated air gap between the building and the exterior wall cladding. This gap generates a “chimney effect” that fosters a better natural ventilation and aids the heat and moisture removal.
But the advantages of ventilated facades are many more: first of all, they help protect buildings against the action of rain and wind, keeping them dry; they also reflect solar radiations, helping reduce the amount of heat absorbed by buildings; a really interesting aspect for those areas with hot weather conditions. In this way, with the combined action of the stone covering, the ventilated air gap and the application of insulating material, a reduction in the air conditioning costs may be easily achieved.
In addition to this, these facades may promote the reflection of external noise, above all if they are made of stone because the properties of absorption and acoustic transmission of this natural material improve the soundproofing performance of buildings.
According to this, stone wall coverings with 3D textures may increase their sound absorbency features because these three-dimensional effects provide a broader contact surface with the incidental wave, encouraging the dissipation of a higher amount of sound energy.
Also for this reason, the Company’s R&D Dept. decided to apply some of its 3D indoor textures to exteriors: indeed, the “organza outdoors” and the “chiffon outdoors” wall coverings are inspired by the “organza” and the “chiffon” wall coverings from the indoor ”Drappi di Pietra” collection.
Characterized by bold 3d effects and a great elegance, some textures of this collection become the right selection for an outdoor application.
The “organza outdoors” and the upcoming “chiffon outdoors” coverings keep the same decorative patterns and 3D effects of the two above-mentioned indoor textures and, with the appropriate exterior stone materials, they bring the same charm and elegance outdoors.
In this way, the company shows how it wants to also focus on the acoustic quality of living spaces that is essential for a better life, today.

The decorative patterns of ventilated facades: which ones to choose?
In selecting then the most appropriate decorative patterns for exteriors, the “organza outdoors” and “chiffon outdoors” coverings were the choice for a collection aimed to surprise and enchant.

These textures are the perfect choice for building facades desiring to catch passers-by’ attention and giving the wow factor to a design project. In this way, the building façade stands out for its aesthetic as well as for its technical aspects improving guests’ experience.

Besides this exterior wall collection, the company launched “Barcode“, a second line that is completely different from the first one. Indeed, to counterbalance the range of coverings from the “Drappi di Pietra Outdoors” collection, the Company’s R&D Dept. decided to tailor a minimal series of outdoor stone wall tiles, wanting to provide designers with a collection whose decorative patterns were able to match the surrounding landscape with a style going beyond design trends and that was perfect to be applied to large surfaces, too.

Similar to a digital language, the collection reveals its first texture, the “zero” ventilated facade, characterized by a linear decorative style, available in different layout schemes giving the possibility to opt for the most suitable one according to the design projects professionals are working on.

Ventilated facades rhyme with challenge.
A challenge Lithos Design decided to face, as a need to be satisfied following the everlasting desire to step forward, move and create something new.
A new adventure but also a natural evolution of the company history tracing a new path all to explore and, for this reason, so exciting!