Q: I thought sandstone was a soft material. How durable is yours?

A: As a geologist and a gemologist with a long history in construction , I would not dream of spending almost a million dollars in establishing our company if our product was not of the toughest quality.

As an agatised sandstone, it is considered in India to be as tough as cement. Of course, if you hit cement with a hammer it will chip also. Our same sandstone material is also used for indoor and outdoor wall and floor tiles which are popular around the world. Having had the luxury of viewing countless ancient temples, palaces and monuments, built out of the same sandstone that we use, I was amazed at the freshness of the carving and perfect condition, even though they are hundreds of years old.There are hundreds of different kinds of sandstone, all with different types of mineral sand grain and formed under different pressures etc. The name "sandstone" tends to imply a softness, not unlike a bluff face at the beach that we could carve our name on with a piece of drift wood.

We often encourage clients to rub our stone hard to see if any fine powder or sand grains come off on their hands . Obviously none does as it has been formed under extreme pressure for hundreds of millions of years into a beautiful sedimentary rock, where the silicon has bonded itself in solution to an extremely hard rock.

It will not calcify and powder, losing its structure, like a cantera that has not had regular silicon sealing. Very often we have customers ask us how to stop their cantera fountains from crumbling and falling apart. Because of this, many individuals are skeptical of other stone types as well.

Touching and seeing is believing. My quality control department is very particular about only quarrying the hardest known sandstone in the world. India has among the most advanced stone carving traditions in the world. Only the hardest stones are carved for architectural applications. Pride and professionalism motivates our factory studio in India, and we stand by our work with a complete money-back guarantee on all our products. I often say if you rub our sandstone with your keys you will be surprised how quickly your keys will wear down, and hence need to be recut.

People often ask about the durability of our sandstone. Well, seeing is believing. The bas-relief you see in the image below is 2,000 years old and has survived the extreme tropical climate of India. The detail of the carving is as clear today as it was in ancient times.

[Inner face of the western gate (Torana) at Sabchi. Depicting scenes from the life of Buddha, winged lions, the Stupa and the Wheel -- Andbra Dynasty, late 1st Century B.C. -- early 1st Century AD ]