Home/Products/Flexible Special Texture/Cement Design Board
Flexible Special Texture Series · MBSNJZ
Cement Design Board
Trowelled cement, held still. The sweep of the float, the odd hairline, the colour shift where the trowel paused — frozen into a 4 mm sheet that goes up with adhesive.
Cement Design Board is the flat, hand-finished end of the range. There is no board grain and no tie holes; what there is, is the movement of a steel float across a wet surface, plus a fine network of crazing that you only see when the light rakes across it.
Render keeps curing after the scaffold comes down. It cracks, it dusts, it goes patchy behind a downpipe. This sheet is already at the state it will be in ten years from now, which is either the point or a disappointment, depending on what you were hoping for.
Grey, but which grey
The catalogue colour is a warm mid-grey, closer to a lime render than to Portland cement. Under 3000 K downlights it goes biscuit; under daylight it reads cooler. Order the sample board and look at it in the room, not on the screen.
Used where the render failed
The shopfront below had been rendered twice and had cracked twice along the same line. The panel went on over the sound render in a day, and the joint pattern was set to miss the crack. The interior shot is a café where the client wanted the wall to look like a Victorian brick vault that had been plastered and then stripped back.
Installed, cement design board
Good for
- Shopfronts and entrance walls where render has cracked before
- Interior walls that need to look hand-finished rather than specified
- Wet rooms and kitchens, on a sealed substrate
- Covering a patchy existing wall without a skim coat
Not for
- Feature walls where the client expects a visible trowel pattern at 1:1
- External walls without a drained cavity behind the panel
- Colour-matched extensions: batch variation is real, order in one go
Specification
Everything below applies to the Cement Design Board as supplied. Samples and datasheets come with the first quote.
| Sheet size | 1200 × 3000 mm |
|---|---|
| Thickness | 4 mm ± 0.5 mm |
| Weight | 6.5 kg/m² ± 0.5 |
| Substrate | Mineral powder, sand and fibreglass, pressed in a steel mould |
| Fire | EN 13501-1 A2-s1,d0, on a non-combustible substrate |
| Fixing | Polymer adhesive, or mechanical fixings on a ventilated frame |
| MOQ | Stocked colours ship from stock, no minimum |
| Lead time | 3–5 days for stock, 20–25 days for production |
Fitting it
Four steps, and the third one is the one that goes wrong.
Questions we get asked
Will it crack like render?
No. The cracks in the pattern are moulded, not structural. The sheet itself is a glass-fibre reinforced mineral board and moves with the substrate rather than against it.
Can it be painted over?
It can, with a mineral paint, but there is little reason to. The point of the sheet is the colour it already is, and paint fills the fine crazing that makes it convincing.
Is it the same as microcement?
No. Microcement is a 2–3 mm trowelled coating applied wet on site, so it needs a skilled hand and three days. This is a finished sheet, cut and glued, and you can see the whole wall before it is opened.
Which is flatter: this or Aggregate Wood?
This one. Aggregate Wood carries the board grain and the tie holes; Cement Design Board is the flat option when the wall needs to stay quiet.
What is the smallest order?
One sheet. Stocked colours ship from Ningbo stock in 3–5 days, and there is no minimum on a trial order.
Sample of Cement Design Board
A4 offcut, posted from Ningbo, free. Ask for the colour card too — it has all seventeen textures in the series.
Same series