Looking after a stone floor that a building walks through all day.
A lobby floor is judged by every person who crosses it. Most of the damage it takes comes not from the traffic but from how it is cleaned between visits. This is what a maintenance plan should actually contain.
Stone is not one material. A polished marble foyer, a honed limestone corridor and a terrazzo lobby have different hardness, porosity and finish, and the same cleaning contract will look after one of them and slowly ruin the other two. The plan starts with what the floor is.
How a building floor declines
It goes in stages, and the stages are predictable. First the floor loses clarity. Then a haze develops in the busiest lanes. Then isolated marks stop lifting during routine cleaning. Then the contrast between the protected areas and the exposed ones is obvious to a visitor. By the time it reaches a committee agenda, it is no longer a cleaning question.
What drives it is grit carried in from the street acting as sandpaper under shoes and trolley wheels, moisture at the entry carrying that grit deeper, coffee and food acids etching calcium-based stone near the café or the lift, and cleaning products chosen for the rest of the building being used on the stone. The last one matters most because it happens every night.
Routine cleaning that does no harm
Dry dust mopping or vacuuming before any wet cleaning, because grit that is mopped is grit that is ground in. A neutral pH cleaner, used sparingly, with water changed often; a mop that is carrying dissolved cleaner to the far side of the lobby is dressing the floor in residue. No acids on marble, limestone, travertine or terrazzo, ever, including the descalers and bathroom products that end up in the cleaner's trolley. No aggressive alkaline strippers as a routine product. Matting at every external door, long enough to take three or four steps.
If the contract cleaners are using the right products in the right way, specialist visits can be about correction and protection. If they are not, the schedule should change before the floor does.
Periodic deep cleaning
Routine cleaning cannot lift the oils, residues and compacted soil that build up in a floor over months. A periodic deep clean resets it without the abrasives: low-moisture mechanical cleaning with stone-safe pads on most floors, extraction or grout-focused work where the floor is tiled. Done properly it also makes the nightly clean work better.
Planned honing and polishing
When the finish itself has gone, cleaning cannot bring it back. Honing removes light scratching, etching and uneven dullness; polishing restores reflection where the stone and the finish call for it. Done on a schedule that matches the traffic, this is what keeps a lobby looking the same year after year and keeps grinding, the expensive stage, off the books. Done as a rescue after years of neglect, it is a bigger job with more downtime.
In a building this work is done in sections, wet, with the area sheeted and the dust controlled, so that residents and tenants are never locked out of the whole floor at once. The how-we-work page sets out what that looks like on the day.
Sealing
A penetrating sealer slows how fast the stone absorbs a spill. It does not make it stain-proof, scratch-proof or acid-proof, and it is not a coating that adds shine. It is still essential in a lobby, a corridor or a wet area, and it is checked, not reapplied by the calendar: a few drops of water that darken the stone instead of beading on it mean it is time.
When maintenance becomes restoration
Widespread scratching, heavy etching, deep-set stains, lippage, damaged grout, chipped edges, or a finish that has simply gone. At that point the answer is grinding, honing, polishing and sealing in whatever combination the floor needs. It is more work than maintenance and far less than replacement, which in a building means demolition, disposal, matching stone that no longer exists, and weeks of a foyer out of service.
What a plan looks like
Inspection first: stone, finish, condition, traffic, slip requirements, previous treatments. A written routine for the cleaners that names the products and the method. A deep clean and a sealer check on a period matched to the traffic. Honing or polishing on a longer period, again matched to the floor rather than to a template. And a photograph of the floor at each visit, so the committee can see what was done rather than take anyone's word for it.
On this site
Related questions.
Do you do commercial work, foyers and strata?
Yes, where the job suits the way we work. Foyer floors, reception benches and common-area bathrooms are the same stone and the same method as a home, at larger scale and usually after hours. Strata and building managers get a written scope, a schedule that works around residents, and the insurance certificate before we start.
Is it messy? How much dust is there?
Very little. Marble is polished wet. Water keeps the abrasives cool and it keeps the dust down, so the process produces a slurry that is vacuumed up rather than a cloud. The room is protected before we start: joinery and appliances are masked, adjoining floors are covered, and the working area is contained. There is some noise from the machine, comparable to a vacuum cleaner. You do not need to leave the house, though most people prefer to be out of the room being worked. We leave the space cleaner than we found it, which is a fair thing to hold us to.
Do you move furniture?
Yes, within reason. Sofas, dining tables, rugs and most freestanding pieces we move and put back. Fitted joinery, appliances and anything plumbed in stays where it is and we work around it, protecting it as we go. Very heavy or valuable pieces are best moved before we arrive, and we say which ones when we quote. A stone dining table is usually worked in place rather than moved, since it is heavier than it looks and the risk of damage in moving it is higher than the inconvenience of working around it.