What drives the price, why one average is useless, and what a quotation needs to contain.
36 questions in this harvest fall under this subject. 5 answered so far.
The spread is enormous — roughly a five-times difference between porcelain printed terrazzo and a poured cement floor — so an average is not a useful number. What moves the price is the process, the aggregate, the finish and the size of the job. Ask for a figure per process, not for terrazzo.
Ask which process it is, what the topping thickness is, and where the numbers come from. Those three answers settle most of the specification. Everything else — colour, chip, finish — is a preference, and a supplier who cannot answer the first three clearly cannot answer the rest.
Because porcelain is pressed and fired and terrazzo is cast and ground. Porcelain comes out of a kiln in a few hours with a printed face; terrazzo is mixed, cured, then mechanically ground flat and polished in stages. The extra cost is the grinding and the labour in it, and it buys two things porcelain cannot: a surface that carries real stone through its thickness, and a floor that can be re-ground.
Not in a way that survives contact with the installation. Marble is bought by the slab and its price carries the yield loss of cutting it; terrazzo is cast, so a floor costs roughly the aggregate and the grinding rather than the loss. Over a life, terrazzo usually comes out ahead because it does not etch and does not need replacing.
Always. A photograph cannot show you the depth of a ground surface, the way a chip catches light, or whether the colour you chose reads warm or cold against your own wall — and those three are the whole of the decision. Specify against a physical sample, in daylight, and keep it.
These are the phrasings people typed, not headings we invented. Where one has an answer the link is live; where it does not it is printed plain, and that is deliberate — a printed question with nothing behind it is an honest promise, and hiding it is not.
Read the answer first — it says which of these to specify and why.
Ordered by how many questions each one holds.