The shift from traditional 600 × 600 mm tiles to large-format porcelain — Laminam, Maxfine, Florim Magnum — has pushed tile work much closer to stonemasonry. A single Laminam slab is 1,620 × 3,240 mm, six millimetres thick, and weighs about 80 kg. Drop it once and you've thrown away €600 of material. Cut it badly and the entire wall reads as crooked because there's no grout line to hide behind.

This is the work we love. And it's the work that demands the right tools, full stop.

Our cutting setup for luxury apartments centres on three pieces of kit. For straight cuts we run a Montolit P3 Masterpiuma 3300 mm rail with a titanium scoring wheel — score once, snap clean, no chip on either edge. For shaped cuts, mitres and large penetrations we use a Husqvarna TS 100 R wet saw fitted with a Lackmond continuous-rim diamond blade, water-cooled to keep the porcelain from micro-fracturing. For the 45° mitres that let us wrap a slab around an exterior corner with no visible edge, we use the Sigma Klick Klock 45° guide and finish the bevel by hand with a Mirka Deros 5650 random orbital with diamond resin pads stepping from 50 to 3000 grit.

The tolerance we hold ourselves to on a luxury apartment fit-out is 0.5 mm across a three-metre wall. That's not a marketing number — it's what's required for the joints to read as "seamless" rather than "joined." When two mitred slabs meet at a corner, anything wider than half a millimetre catches the light and undoes the entire effect.

Recent project in Amsterdam Zuid: 180 m² of book-matched Calacatta-effect Florim across walls, floor and a freestanding island in the master bathroom. Eighteen slabs, every joint dry-fitted before adhesive, three days to cut and two days to set. The result is a room that reads as carved from a single piece of stone — which is exactly the point.

If you're specifying large-format porcelain for a project, please talk to us before the slabs are ordered. Half of getting the install right is laying out the cuts on paper first.