We spend so much time in this industry deploring the nefarious activity of design copying, with all its inferior fakes and knock-offs, and rightly so. Apart from the sheer unfairness of it, it’s theft. If you believe in the value of design – of considered authorship, high-end materials and quality production and craftsmanship – resulting in long-life products, the notion of buying a copy will be anathema to you.
But if you’re talking about the technically virtuosic copying of a finite natural material in the name of environmental sustainability, I’m all for it. This was the starting point for a collaboration between hospitality-design firm Hirsch Bedner Associates and Italian ceramic-tile experts Atlas Concorde that has produced what the manufacturer terms ‘extreme realism’. Their collaboration in the development of the 
