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Stone Planet offers a range of Ledge Stone Wall Cladding with matching interlocking corners for Indoors & Outdoor areas. This cement backed natural stone panels are larger with 20 to 35mm random thickness for your residential & commercial projects.
There’s a moment when a pallet arrives, your installer goes to lift a box and it’s heavier than they expected. That’s not an error but a mismatch between what people assume a stone panel should weigh and what a cement-backed stone panel actually weighs. Its always because nobody explained the difference before the order went in.
Ledge Stone wall cladding is a panelised format where the stone doesn’t arrive loose like our free form wall cladding. Instead its made differently for every panel in our range. The natural stone pieces are attached to cement backing rather than glued to a mesh. The finished ledge stone panel is heavier not only visually but also in real lifting. Here the pieces are larger and more randomly sized.
It is also called ledge stone, ledgestone, ledgestone cladding, ledgestone panels, cement-backed stone panels. These are all the same product spelled differently depending on who’s selling it. Stone planet uses genuine quarried natural stones bonded together into a cement panel and not a cast concrete product made to resemble one.
| Attributes | Stone Planet Ledge Stone Specifications |
|---|---|
| Supply format | Panels supplied in a box |
| Construction | Cement backed natural stone panels |
| Stone pieces | Random large size |
| Stone thickness | Around 20 to 35 mm |
| Panel size | Around 600x200mm |
| Weight | Heavier than Stacked Stone panels |
| Corners | Two-piece interlocking pattern |
| Application areas | Large exterior elevations, boundary walls, entry areas |
The real difference is what is behind the stone. Stacked Stone is glued to a mesh backing with smaller pieces arranged tightly in layers making it lighter in weight. Ledge Stone is fixed into cement backing with larger randomly sized pieces which makes it heavier. That single difference in the backing material is the reason why one format goes up on almost any wall without much of a conversation and the other one deserves a proper look at what the wall is actually made of before you order.
In the Australian market you will find ledgestone and stackstone used as interchangeable marketing words on plenty of websites, showrooms or warehouses sometimes for the exact same product. Stone Planet doesn’t do that. If what you’re picturing is a cleaner and more even texture in a lighter weight panel, that’s Stacked Stone Walling. If what you want is the bolder and more rugged look that only larger stone on a cement panel can give you then you’re in the right place.
It is important to understand why this format is built the way it is. The cement backing is not a manufacturing preference, instead it is a type of job utility.
A mesh backing works beautifully under small, light stone pieces. Ledge Stone is heavy and simply more mass for the mesh to hold and more variation in its shape. A cement backing solves this problem by giving the panel genuine structural strength rather than a thin adhesive film. This way it can carry bigger stone pieces without the panel breaking or the pieces getting loose due to the glue.
A cement backing weighs something in its own right, on top of the stone sitting on it, and that combined weight is the single biggest planning consideration on this format.
The stone on our Ledge panels runs around 20 to 35mm in thickness. That is only the stone and then the cement backing sits behind it. So the panel is lot thicker than that. Also the finished natural stone wall cladding with the adhesive bed increases the total thickness on the wall.
Yes, cutting a cement-backed panel is genuinely different to cutting a tile or a mesh-backed stone piece. Again because you’re not cutting the stone but also a cement bed at the same time. Dry-cutting a cement-backed panel gives hazardous amount of fine silica dust and the cut you get from it is not clean and has a lot of chipping.Always wet cut with a diamond blade.
Corner panels are the trickiest part of the wall cladding installation process because you are often trimming a piece that already has its own interlocking geometry and a small slip there can waste an entire corner panel rather than just a flat panel. The practical approach most installers use is to plan the layout so corners are handled properly.
Our corners come as a two-piece interlocking system. They are installed at the external corner so the stone face wraps it without a mitred seam holding the whole thing together.
One thing specific to this format is that the corner panels in a cement-backed system are heavier and considerably more brittle to handle than a flat panel. Always store them flat and supported rather than leaning them on an edge against a wall. It is suggested to handle them individually coming off the pallet rather than sliding several at once. We’ve replaced enough cracked corner boxes over the years due to this handling issue at the site.
Every Ledge Stone project should have this conversation before ordering, not after the pallet arrives.
Cement-backed cladding is genuinely heavy compared with almost anything else that goes on a wall. It is heavier than a tile or our mesh-backed Stacked panels. That weight has to go somewhere and that somewhere is what the wall is actually built from.
Solid masonry, brick and concrete carry it comfortably. Though older or off-form concrete sometimes needs preparation first to get a proper bond. Rendered blockwork is a common and reliable base. If it is a framed wall or a fibre cement sheet that wasn’t built with a heavy cladding load in mind should be thought through properly. That’s not a reason to rule the format out. It’s a reason to have your builder or installer look at the actual wall build-up before the order goes in.
It is always in the first few months after a wall goes up with ledge stone, the same question arises: what’s wrong with the stone?
Nothing is wrong with the stone. What you’re looking at is efflorescence, soluble salts that were already present in the cement backing or the adhesive or the substrate. They get dissolved in the moisture which might have been in the wall and travelling to the surface as that moisture evaporates. This leads to crystallization into a white or greyish deposit. It needs three things at once to happen: salt, moisture and somewhere for the moisture to evaporate to. Remove any one of those and it stops on its own.
Cement-backed panels are more prone to this than our mesh-backed Stacked range only because they have a cement backed panel. A brand new wall carries the highest moisture and salt load it will ever have which is exactly why this shows up early and then fades on its own over the following months.
If it’s already happened to you then let the wall dry out fully and find a brush. Use that brush to get rid of the deposits repeating over a few weekends as the wall works through its initial salt load. Don’t wash it off with water because that redissolves the salts and carries them straight back into the stone to reappear later. And don’t reach for an acid cleaner as well particularly on a calcium based stone such as travertine or limestone, where acid does permanent damage that has nothing to do with the salts and everything to do with the stone itself.
A few things reduce how much you’ll see efflorescence.
This is where Ledge Stone is preferred the most. A boundary wall created with faces in Ledge Stone comes out as a real stone wall rather than a cladded one. It is only because of the large pieces on the panel. If you’re still deciding on the whole boundary or front-fence project rather than the walling format itself, that decision belongs on Boundary Walls.
A large home elevation gives the bigger pieces room to actually show its elegance. Retail and hospitality frontages use it heavily for exactly this reason: it reads as solid stone from across a street. The visual effect of these ledge stone cladding beats any other paneled format.
Our stone layers the face of an engineered retaining structure. Many retaining walls cannot hold the weight of these ledge stone panels and should be consulted before ordering.
Double height entries, stairwells with big open living spaces need bigger stone pieces to uplift the space. A smaller interior wall usually suits Stacked Stone Walling better.
A large chimney carries bigger pieces well. What governs the actual installation is the appliance manufacturer’s clearance requirements for that specific unit.
The process looks similar to any panel installation with several differences from the weight to the size of the panels. This is worth knowing even if you’re not the one doing the installation.
The substrate(on which the ledge stone is getting installed) gets assessed before anything else. Once that’s done, the wall is then prepared the same way as any natural stone wall cladding installation: flat, sound, clean, dry, rendered where needed.
Panel backs get brushed off before bonding(bonding means joining two panels here). Cement backed panels carry a certain amount of dust on the rear face from the factory itself and this dust between the panel and the adhesive is a bond breaker which often gets ignored. This can lead to the loosening of the panels. A quick brush and a light damp wipe on a sunny hot day makes a real difference in terms of the girp of these panels.
Installers typically work in shorter shifts of installing these panels in comparison to a lighter panel. Its only because a heavy panel can creep slightly downward on a fresh adhesive bed due to its own weight before the adhesive has properly grabbed onto it. Wedges and spacers hold the layers in place while that happens, and a sensible installer stops a section and lets it set rather than pushing a wall to full height in one continuous run.
Cutting happens wet, as informed above, with proper dust control because cutting cement-backed stone genuinely does produce respirable silica dust and that’s a health disaster.
Ledge Stone wall cladding has a smaller selection than other formats because not every stone suits being set into a cement panel.
The best seller materials in ledge stones are Granite, Bluestone, Quartzite.
Stone Planet will suggest you to choose ledge stones when the wall is large enough that the bigger pieces have room to read properly. Go for Stacked Stone Walling when the area is small, indoors or the substrate isn’t built to carry extra weight.
Want individual loose random sized pieces instead of a panel? Free Form Stone Wall Cladding with flat sawn backs and Traditional Walling are the best options. For a detailed guide on wall cladding you can View Our Natural Stone Wall Cladding: What to Check Before You Buy guide for better.
Stone planet has been importing and supplying natural stone walling across the Globe since 1993. Ledge Stone is the format where we spend the most time on the phone before an order goes in.
That conversation is where we’re actually useful. Stone Planet will tell you the real weight class, the backing construction and the panel size honestly. We’ll ask about the wall before we talk about the stone and what it’s built from, how high it runs or whether it’s coastal.
Stone Planet is a supplier of this format. We don’t install it and we are straight forward about the fixing decision than blur it in the conversation.
Yes, it is harder than cutting a tile or a mesh-backed panel. Its because you are cutting the stone and cement panel together. You need a wet saw with a diamond blade rated for combination cutting. Never do a dry cut which throws hazardous dust and gives a worse edge anyway.
The only difference is the backing of these panels. Ledge Stone is cement-backed with larger stone pieces whereas Stacked Stone is glued to a mesh backing with smaller pieces. Ledgestone is heavy and stackedstone is light in weight.
Ledge stone wall cladding is quite heavy than a tile and heavier than our mesh-backed Stacked panels. Its because of the cement backing behind the larger stone pieces.
It is efflorescence where salts already present in the cement backing and adhesive are carried to the surface by moisture and left behind as it evaporates. It's common on new cement-backed work and normally fades within the first few months. Let the wall dry and brush the deposit off dry. Don't wash it off and don't use an acid cleaner.
The capping is required to overhang the faces of the wall cladding and throw water away from it rather than sitting as most of the weathering damage on a stone wall starts from water getting in at the top rather than through the face itself.
It clads the face of one. The engineered retaining structure does the actual retaining, and the stone faces it.
