Sonoma Cast Stone offers 48 stock colors. Custom color matching is also available. Our catalog and our website will give you a guide to some of the more popular natural colors. Before ordering, it is important that the buyer understands about the nature of concrete colors.

When a refrigerator or an automobile rolls off the assembly line, we have come to expect that "Navajo White" will look almost exactly like it did in the brochure. The paints used on these appliances are sprayed with man-made acrylic and epoxy plastic paints under the utmost control.

That entire situation changes when you buy materials made from nature. Any experienced designer will tell the woes of trying to match fabric that has come from one dye lot to another. The same color variance occurs in the manufacturing of concrete.

Concrete is made entirely of natural materials. The basic components of concrete water, sand, stone, cement and pigment all come from nature. All five of these materials are constantly varying. In the winter, the air has more moisture, as do all of the other ingredients. As a result we mix less water into our concrete batch. Pigments are like watercolors. The more water you add, the weaker the color. In the summer we may have add more water to the batch and balance it by adding more pigment to achieve the same color.

If you look closely at a pile of rocks, you will note the wide range of color from rock to rock and even within each rock. Small rocks give concrete its strength. Tiny rocks are what we call sand. Sand varies from a jet black to a brilliant white and every brown color imaginable. Each truckload of sand, from the same quarry, will vary greatly. Even cement wrapped in neat packages varies in color from batch to batch.

Working with natural materials is an art, not a science. It is that very art that helps make concrete the beautiful, warm material that it is. The color charts we provide are only a guide to the color that you will eventually receive. The two will almost never exactly match.

The uniqueness of each piece of concrete that we manufacture adds to its value. Again concrete is made entirely of natural materials. Understanding this we hope will allow your clients to love and enjoy these natural products.