Materials & Finishes for Premium Prefab Buildings

The prefab building materials here are panels and the coatings on them, drawn from eight families. This page names all eight, and says where a warm natural material may go and where it may not.

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A01 · Abstract title-block sheet

The page · 01

Every surface here is a manufactured product with a name

A finish on one of these buildings is a panel or a coating on a panel, and each one can be named, specified and ordered. Fibre-cement rainscreens, composite rainscreens, powder-coated steel and aluminium panels, anodised aluminium, glazed and extruded terracotta, stone-composite panels and standing-seam metal roofing are the working vocabulary, and a design that reaches outside it says so on its own page.

This matters more than it sounds. A colour chosen for a picture and never specified is how a building ends up looking unlike the thing that sold it. Every family below exists as a real product, on a real lead time, in a real finish, so the surface you approve on a drawing is the surface a hand touches when the building is finished.

The page · 02

The eight finish families, and the light each was chosen for

Charcoal zinc with a white stone composite, for a metro plot with a clipped lawn and hard morning shadows. Blue-grey fibre-cement rainscreen, for bright overcast light, wet paving and deep green mature trees. Red-oxide aluminium with lime white, for red earth and a mango orchard under a low warm sun. Sea-green composite with warm bronze, for the coastal strip, coconut and areca palms and a soft haze.

Sandstone-toned rainscreen with sage green, for a walled garden of frangipani and champa in dry warm light. Terracotta baguettes with cream stone composite, for misty broadleaf hills at golden hour. Basalt black with brass, for dark rock, still water and the blue hour running into night. Forest green with charcoal, for tea-plantation hills and cool morning mist.

A ninth is available where a design calls for it: a fair-faced concrete appearance in a manufactured panel. It is worth saying again that this is an appearance rather than a trade. A family also brings its setting with it. Where a design is issued in a second family, the ground, the planting, the light and the hour move with the palette, because a colour read against the wrong landscape tells you nothing.

The page · 03

No timber and no bamboo on the outside of any building

Not as cladding, not as a rainscreen, not as a screen, louvre, fin or brise-soleil, not as a soffit, not as decking, a step or a handrail, and not as a window frame seen from outside. This is a decision about weathering rather than taste. Timber outside is a promise about maintenance and fire that this company does not make, and in Indian sun and monsoon it is the first surface to age badly.

Where a warm natural tone is wanted, the tone stays and the material changes. A timber rainscreen becomes a wood-tone anodised or powder-coated aluminium plank, fine-ribbed and open-jointed. A timber screen or fin becomes anodised aluminium fins or extruded terracotta baguettes. A timber or bamboo soffit becomes the same tone rendered as a finish on a manufactured board, or a plain or micro-perforated metal panel, and a timber deck becomes fine-ribbed aluminium decking, porcelain or stone paving.

The substitution is honest rather than concealed, which is why it is written on a public page. Metal reads as metal at close range: a machined edge, an even satin sheen that shifts as you move, no grain, no knots and no plank ends. A surface intended to be mistaken for wood at arm’s length would fail the standard, and the drawings name what each surface actually is.

The page · 04

Inside is a different rule, and timber belongs there

Floors, joinery, wall linings and ceilings inside a building may be timber, and often are. Furniture may be timber inside or out — a bench, a bed, a table, a chair. An interior seen through glass from the garden may show timber, because it is an interior. The rule is about what stands in the weather, not about what a room is made of.

The interior palette of a design follows its exterior family rather than departing from it: the same three colours, warmed, with the timber, stone and textile that belong to them. Where a design offers more than one interior palette, each is shown against the finish it was chosen to sit with, so the pairing is judged by looking rather than assembled later from two separate boards.

The page · 05

What never changes, whichever family a building carries

Three things stay constant through every family and every design: the glass, the dark or bronze glazing frame, and the panel joint line. They are the reason a client scrolling this site can tell that twenty-six different buildings came from one studio, and they are deliberately the elements a finish choice cannot reach.

Three surfaces move: the wall or cladding tone, the screen or fin tone, and the soffit or base tone. Within one set the geometry, the glazing, the landscape and the camera hold still, so two colourways of a design really are one building photographed twice. A second set is a different matter, being a different building in a family of its own.

The page · 06

The finish is the last decision, and the only one a visitor sees

The building is chosen first, then the arrangement on your plot, then the decisions that shape it, and the finish last. That order is deliberate. A finish chosen early tends to drag the design after it, and a client ends up defending a colour rather than a building. Chosen last, it is a free decision made against a setting you already know.

Each design is shown in more than one family where the sets exist, with one noticeably darker and one noticeably lighter than the approved original, so the range shows real choice rather than three versions of the same idea. Look at them against your own light, at the hour you will most often see the building, and choose there.

Questions

Questions to settle around material character tied to maintenance reality.

Can I have a colour that is not one of the eight families?

Ask, and the answer will be about the product rather than the shade. The families exist because each is a manufactured panel or coating that can actually be ordered and repeated. A colour outside them is possible where a real product carries it, and impossible where it would mean inventing a finish for one building.

Why does the same design look different on two pages?

Either it is one building wearing a second family, shot where that family belongs, or it is a second set, which is a second building altogether. The page says which. In the first case the form, the glazing, the roof and the camera hold; only the three tones and the ground beneath them move.

Is the wood-look aluminium going to look fake?

It looks like metal in a warm tone, and it is meant to. The intention is not to imitate timber closely enough to deceive anyone at arm’s length; it is to give an elevation the warmth a timber screen would give it without the maintenance a timber screen brings. The sheets call the material by its real name.

What about the roof — is that a finish choice too?

Partly. The roof build-up is a design decision settled on the section, and the visible surface is a metal roof or a panel where the design says so. Which of them a particular building carries is named as that design is drawn rather than left to a photograph, because the roof is the surface a photograph shows worst.

Do you publish thermal or acoustic figures for these materials?

No, and no such figure appears as ours anywhere on this site. Those values depend on the whole build-up and on a test, and a number quoted without both is a number that will not survive a meeting. Where a published standard applies, it is named. What your building achieves is settled with your own consultant.

How long do these finishes last?

That is a question about a specific product on a specific coast or hillside, and it is answered per project rather than in a sentence on a website. The twenty-five-year warranty is the manufacturing group’s, qualified per building in the quotation, and it does not extend to a performance figure of any kind.

Choose the building first, and the finish against your own light

Ask for the material board for any drawn design, with its build-up details, and judge the surfaces against the setting your own plot actually has.

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