A tour inside the vast headquarters where Dekton, Silestone and Sensa are fabricated - and the trip that helped shape our Lewes showroom’s Bamboo Basement Kitchen.
By Ollie Clark.
Our friends at Cosentino invited us out to their headquarters in Cantoria, Almería, Spain. These trips run several times a year, bringing designers and specifiers to see the three materials at the centre of everything they make: Silestone, Dekton and Sensa. The invitation came through our Cosentino representative, Claire Hillier-Brook, and we flew into Málaga, then transferred on to a hotel in Almería - a party of about twelve, all of us from the world of kitchen design.
I wasn’t quite prepared for the scale of it.
The headquarters sit inside a complex of 1.5 million square metres: factories, warehouses, offices and a vast solar park. The architecture is cinematic - somewhere between a university complex and an exotic Ian Fleming lair. There are almost no workers to be seen. Everything is automated, and there is no noise at all. It feels like the future.
The sample room is laid out beautifully - stones displayed like sacred artefacts. From there the tour moved through a calm, minimal lecture hall and on to the warehouse, which is on a scale that brings to mind the closing shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark: white lines marking out each zone, and every movement carried out by robots. Among it all, the Sensa slabs stood out - raw quartzite with mysterious, beautiful markings that identify each stone from the quarry.
I knew of Dekton before the trip, but seeing how it's made changed how I think about it.
It begins as a blend of glass, porcelain and quartz, fused together with 25,000 tons of uniform pressure - roughly two and a half times the weight of the Eiffel Tower. That degree of compaction eliminates the micro-defects you'd find in most surfaces: nothing gets in. The result is a surface that resists scratches, stains and heat, and can be made remarkably thin 8mm, 12mm or 20mm: impermeable & immensely strong.
Back in Lewes, we installed 12mm Dekton in the basement kitchen at our showroom, using it as both worktop and wall covering. Ultra-thin, continuous, and tough, it was the perfect material for a kitchen with low ceilings - maximising the available space.
If you'd like to see the Dekton in person, the basement kitchen is part of the showroom on Cliffe High Street, and you're welcome to come and run a hand across it to see for yourself.
