Simon's County Crema Porcelain Patio — #MyUniversalPaving

How County Crema Porcelain Made This Garden

Look at the aerial shot. This is a new-build rear garden — the kind that comes with a rectangle of turf, a panel fence, and zero personality. Every house on the street has the same one. Simon's doesn't look like that anymore.

The 900x600 format is doing the heavy lifting here. Larger slabs mean fewer grout lines, which makes a compact patio feel twice its actual size. It's the single most effective trick in small-garden design — and it costs nothing extra. The county crema tone amplifies the effect by bouncing natural light around the space, even on a cloudy afternoon. This is what happens when you choose paving engineered for British conditions, not just styled for a catalogue.

The stepping stone path through the side border is another smart move — it connects the patio to the rest of the garden without paving over the planting beds, keeping the space feeling open and green while giving you a clean, dry route to the side gate. It's the kind of design detail you'd see in a landscape architect's portfolio, executed here with the same slabs as the main patio for visual continuity.

Every porcelain slab we supply is manufactured at 20mm thickness with R11 anti-slip grip, near-zero water absorption (below 0.5%), and UV-stable colouring throughout the body of the tile — not just a surface print. In plain English: a spilled glass of red wine wipes clean. A January night at -5°C won't crack a single slab. And after ten British summers of direct sunlight, the colour stays exactly where it started. Simon will pressure-wash these once a year — if he can be bothered — and they'll look identical to the day they were laid.

That's not marketing language. That's material science. And it's the standard we hold every product in our range to before it reaches our Nottingham yard.

What Simon Meant by "Better Than the Other Supplier"

That line in his review — "better than what I saw with the other supplier near me" — is the sentence we hear more than any other. And the reason is structural, not cosmetic.

Most UK paving retailers source from third-party importers, add their margin, and sell it on. The product passes through two or three hands before it reaches your garden, and every hand takes a cut. Universal Paving doesn't work that way. We import directly from verified manufacturing partners, ship containers to our own UK yard, and quality-check every batch before it goes on sale. That means you're buying the same premium-grade porcelain that London showrooms charge £40–50/m² for — at a fraction of the price, with no compromise on what actually lands on your pallet.

That's the Universal Paving model: premium products, direct import pricing, and a team in Nottingham who actually know paving — not a call centre reading from a script. If you're a landscaper or installer, our trade programme gives you dedicated pricing, priority dispatch, and a named account manager — apply in 60 seconds.