What Aura Surfaces Actually Puts On The Table — A Roundup of Our Roster
The question I get more often than any other isn’t about a specific material at Aura Surfaces. It isn’t about a brand. It’s the one almost every new client, every new architect, every friend at a dinner party eventually asks — “Hang on, what do you guys actually do?” So this week’s Surface Notes is the honest answer to what Aura Surfaces actually puts on the table.
Aura Surfaces isn’t a shop. It isn’t a tile showroom with a website bolted on. We are a design-led surface design consultancy — which is a long way of saying we sit on your side of the table and help you specify the right surfaces for the project in front of you. Whatever the project is, whatever the budget is, and whatever the brief is asking for.
But to do that well, Aura Surfaces needs a roster. A roster of products, suppliers, and manufacturers we’ve hand-picked because they meet the standard we hold ourselves to. So this week, in case you’ve been wondering the same thing, here’s a walk through that roster. Not a brochure. Not a catalogue list. The reasons behind why each one is on it.
Tiles — The Aura Surfaces Bread and Butter (And Why That’s a Compliment)
Let’s start with the obvious one. Tiles — porcelain, ceramic, small format, large format — are still Aura Surfaces’ biggest business. As much as I sometimes hate to admit it, this is the category that pays the bills.
But that’s okay. Because this is what I know. This is what I have lived and breathed since I was around six years old. We have direct relationships with some of the best tile manufacturers in the world — names that designers know, names that fabricators trust, and a few that you’ve probably never heard of but that produce work I would put on any wall in my own home.
I won’t apologise for being good at tiles. Being deep in one category means we can call a product good or bad with conviction. It means we know what looks great in the showroom and breaks in installation. It means when a designer says “I want the look of marble but I need the durability of porcelain for a wet room” I already know which three options to walk them through and why.
So yes — tiles are our bread and butter. The rest of this article is about what else is on the menu, and why I built that menu in the first place.
Italiana Parquet — Engineered Oak With a Story Worth Telling
There are thousands of engineered oak suppliers on the market. Most are interchangeable. A small handful are not. The first one I want to talk about today is Italiana Parquet.
When I visited their factory in Italy, I expected to see a production line. What I saw was a worldview.
European Oak is, simply, one of the great timbers on this planet. It built Viking ships. It still goes into the sleepers under Britain’s railways. It’s the wood that has carried the weight of European life — literally — for over a thousand years. But this isn’t a history lesson. This is a story about a company that treats the material with the respect it deserves.
Italiana Parquet manage their own forests. They selectively shape their oaks to grow long and straight. They replant. And they use every last fibre of every tree they fell — the prime cuts become the breathtaking engineered flooring we put down for clients, the heartwood goes to railway sleepers, the offcuts go to barrels used in their own vineyard. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is outsourced.
That last point matters. They produce their own multi-layer ply backing in-house, using no aggressive chemical bonding agents. They control the oils and the varnishes. They control the inspection. From seedling to boxed plank — it’s their hands the whole way through.
This is why they hold the environmental certifications they hold. It’s why their boards behave the way you want them to behave once installed. And it’s why lead times sit at 8–10 weeks. Your floor isn’t sitting on a shelf in a warehouse waiting to be sold to whoever calls first. It’s being made for you — inspected by a human, finished by a craftsman, signed off before it gets boxed.
I am proud of our relationship with Italiana Parquet. If you’ve ever stood on an oak floor that just felt different under your foot, you’ll understand why.
Luce di Carrara — Living Marble, From Quarry to Carving
If Italiana Parquet is about respect for a single material, Luce di Carrara — and its parent house Henraux — is about a two-hundred-year mastery of one.
Henraux has been carving the marble of the Apuan Alps since 1821. This is the same range Michelangelo sourced from. The stone that built half of Italy’s classical architecture and an embarrassing number of the world’s great sculptures. Luce di Carrara is its design-led sister brand — taking that lineage, that craft, that quarry access, and translating it into surfaces, objects, basins, lighting and accessories that work in a contemporary home.
Eleven different stones. Thirteen different finishes. A matching catalogue of objects. Which sounds like a list until you stand in front of it and realise the point — you can specify a vanity unit, the basin sitting in it, the wall it’s mounted on, the floor it’s standing on, and the pendant lighting above it, all in the same stone family, all in finishes that have been engineered to live together. That kind of coherence is rare in this industry.
They own their own quarries. They control the cutting. They control the finishing. They re-use over 90% of what they extract — the prime material becomes the showpiece surfaces, the rest becomes substrate, aggregate, and crushed marble for industries you’d never even think of. Almost nothing leaves the site as waste.
Yes — you pay for it. You should. We live in a world where knowing exactly where your stone came from, who quarried it, and what was destroyed (or wasn’t) to get it to you has become a question worth asking. Luce di Carrara has an answer for every one of those questions.
My visit on behalf of Aura Surfaces to the quarry in September 2024 was, candidly, one of the more moving days I’ve spent in this industry. You can watch the video we made there. And if you’re a client on the right kind of project, we would love nothing more than to take you out to see it for yourself. These visits are entirely accessible, they are unforgettable, and they change how you specify stone for the rest of your career. You have to see it. You have to love it. Then you can sell it.
N Stone — Bespoke Terrazzo, Italian-Made
Terrazzo has done a real journey in the last decade — from “1970s school floor” to “the material everyone wants in their kitchen.” And like every category that’s trending, it’s flooded with cheap imitations.
N Stone is not one of them.
Italian-made. Italian-crafted. Bespoke aggregate options. Tiles, surfaces and large-format slabs — the full envelope of what terrazzo can be when it’s done properly. N Stone control the process from raw material to finished product, which means we can talk to one team about everything from initial colourway through to fabrication tolerances. There’s no middleman, no third-party finisher, no excuse-shaped gap in the supply chain.
We love working with N Stone for one reason above all others — at the end of the project, what we’ve put in looks incredible. It looks designed. It looks well-made. It looks like something the client will still love in ten years, when the rest of the scheme has dated and N Stone hasn’t.
Arte — Wallpaper, Reinvented
I’ll be honest. Wallpaper was a category I never thought I’d get excited about. Then I started working with Arte.
Arte is a Belgian house that has spent the last forty years quietly redefining what wallpaper can be — and the answer turns out to be almost anything. Natural materials. Hand-applied finishes. Metallics, leathers, raffia, mica, paper-backed silk. Designs that don’t ask “what colour will match the sofa” but “what mood do you want this room to hold.”
And — increasingly important to us and to our clients — a sustainability story that holds up to scrutiny. Their environmental credentials are not bolted on. They have been engineered into the production process, the supply chain, and the materials themselves. Arte are deliberate about the water and energy footprint of their factories, considered about the finishes they use, and transparent about what those finishes do and don’t release into your home.
But sustainability is the floor. The ceiling is the design. Their collections sit somewhere between art and decor, and when you specify the right one for the right wall, the room stops looking decorated and starts looking composed.
Fiore & Webert — Brassware Made By Hand, In Front Of Your Eyes
Last month I touched briefly on Fiore. This week I want to bring Webert into the picture too, because the two sit alongside each other in our brassware roster and they’re each there for the same reason.
Both are Italian. Both produce in their own factories. Both manufacture over 90% of the components in their own facility — the only parts they don’t make are the elements better bought from specialists (cartridges, certain machined components). And both invited me to watch what they do, from start to finish.
So I did. I watched brass arrive as a raw block. I watched it be cut, machined, and shaped into the body of a tap. I watched components be assembled, polished, finished, coloured, tested, and packed. I watched human eyes inspect things no machine could fairly judge. When Fiore and Webert say their products are handmade, that word is doing real work. I can verify it.
Here is the practical bit, because this is where it gets exciting for the project on your desk:
You can have the entire bathroom in one matching family — shower controls, basin taps, bath fillers, kitchen mixers, screen profiles, flush plates and accessories — in any of twenty-five different finishes. Classic chrome through to coppers, brushed brasses, blacks, and a small selection of wilder, vibrant colours for the project brave enough to ask for them. And for the right client, your own crest, monogram or logo embossed on the product. That is not a sentence many brassware suppliers can finish.
I feel genuinely lucky to be in a position where companies like Fiore and Webert want to work with us. It tells me something is being done right.
But Aura Surfaces Is More Than This
Everything I’ve written above is the heart of what we do. The brands we are proud to represent. The products we’d put in our own homes one day. The suppliers we promote because we genuinely believe in them.
But Aura Surfaces is bigger than the headline roster.
We also supply care homes with sensible, durable, budget-conscious ceramic options. We supply builders and developers working multiple properties to a fixed cost per unit. We specify High Pressure Laminate flooring for car showrooms that need durability and visual impact at scale. We help Airbnb and short-let owners make the kind of first impression that turns a four-star review into a five-star one. We work with hospitality, retail, marine, and the occasional unusual project that the rest of the industry hasn’t quite found a process for yet.
This is what surface design consultant actually means. Tell us the vision, the budget, the constraints, and the brief — and our relationships, our knowledge, and twenty-five years of having seen most of it before will help us land on the right combination of products for the project in front of you.
Why Aura Surfaces Works This Way
I don’t believe in rushing. That’s when mistakes are made.
I believe in building relationships that work both ways — with suppliers, with clients, and with our clients’ clients. I will keep building those relationships, carefully, for as long as I’m doing this job. I will never bite off more than we can chew. I will never specify a product I don’t believe in because the margin is good. And I will never, ever be the pushy salesperson — because it’s not about that.
It has to look right. It has to feel right. And more importantly, it has to be right.
Everything in life — work, family, friendship, business — requires effort, honest conversations, and time. If we can get to all three of those, we’re onto something incredible.
So that’s the roundup. The bread-and-butter, the headline brands, the workhorses, and the philosophy that holds it all together. Lots of products. Lots of relationships. One consistent answer to “what do you guys actually do?”
If you’re embarking on a project — whether it’s a single bathroom refit or a multi-million-pound new build — or you’d just like some advice on something you’re stuck on, please get in touch.
No pushy sales tactics. You either want to work with me or you don’t, and neither of us will know that until we have a conversation. That’s absolutely fine with me.
Watch the video, enjoy the walk-through, and I’ll see you in the next one.
Ashley Fabian is the founder of Aura Surfaces — a design-led surface design consultancy specialising in high-end residential, hospitality and commercial interiors. If this article resonated and you’d like to talk about a project, get in touch via aurasurfaces.uk.
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