Product · MBLJB

Gilded Board

A metal wall panel you can cut with a knife and glue to the wall. Forty-two finishes, on a 4 mm sheet that bends round a column or a 6 mm board that stays flat. No fabricator, no frame, no welding.

Request a sampleSee the 42 finishesColour card (PDF)

Gilded board is the metal end of the range. It is what we quote when a drawing calls for a decorative metal wall panel and the budget, the weight or the curve says no. The face is a foil, brushed or deliberately aged, bonded to the same clay-and-sand board we make for the stone series. Nothing is quarried and nothing is cast. The metal is a surface, and the board underneath is the part that holds the wall.

Worth being plain about that before anything else. There is no sheet steel under the lacquer. It will not take a weld, it will not dent the way a car door dents, and it does not ring when you knock it. What it does is cover a wall that a metal panel cannot reach without a frame, a fabricator and a week of mess in the lobby.

Two boards, one face

The finish is the same on both. What changes is the shape of wall each one will take, and who is doing the fixing.

	Flexible	Hard
Sheet	1200 × 3000 mm	1220 × 2440 mm, or 3000 mm
Thickness	4 mm ± 0.5 mm	6 mm
Cut with	Knife and a straight edge	Saw, or a knife in several passes
Curves	Tight radius, by hand	Not at all
Joint	Butt, tight enough to disappear	Shadow gap or trim, on purpose
Fixed with	Polymer adhesive	Adhesive, or a frame outside
Goes on	Columns, coved corners, curved counters	Flat walls, lift lobbies, corridors, joinery

If you are specifying the flexible one, the sizes, the fixing and the full specification sit on their own page: Gilded board, 4 mm flexible sheet.

The finishes

Forty-two, and every one of them runs on both boards. Thirty are foils. Twelve are aged metals: rust, verdigris, brass, copper long past its best. Those twelve are what people mean when they ask for a copper wall panel that does not look new, and for the gold one that should not either.

What the surface is, and why it stays

Run a finger across a sheet and the grain is there: faint, directional, the way brushed steel runs. It is pressed rather than machined, so a sample and a whole elevation carry the same grain at the same scale. Nothing about the surface changes when it goes from a 100 mm chip to a three-metre wall.

The foil is sealed after the colour goes on. A copper finish stays the copper you signed off rather than drifting darker through its first year, and it does not hold fingerprints the way bare brushed metal does. That last part matters more than it sounds. A lot of metal wall covering in a lobby gets replaced because of hand marks, not because of wear.

Fixing is adhesive, so there are no screws through the face, no rivets, and no bare cut edges to dress afterwards.

Dusk, MBG29, at 1:1

Four millimetres, round a column

This is the reason to take the flexible sheet. A reception column, a coved corner, the curved face of a bar. Places where a rigid metal panel would have to be rolled to shape before anyone could even think about fixing it.

A 1200 × 3000 sheet is light enough for one person to carry up a stairwell. A knife against a straight edge takes it down; a socket wants a jigsaw with a carbide blade, cut on a board and never on the floor, because a chipped edge cannot be sanded out.

The wall behind it only has to be flat, dry and sound. Not plumb to the millimetre. Flat enough that a straight edge does not rock when you lay it across.

Rust, PT01, bent by hand

Six millimetres, straight runs

The hard board is for walls that are already flat and will stay that way. Hotel corridors, lift lobbies, the back of a bar, the wall that meets a luggage trolley every morning.

At 6 mm it takes a joint you can see and use. A shadow gap, a brass trim, a seam every 1220 mm. The flexible sheet can be butt-jointed until the joint stops existing. This cannot, so the joint becomes part of the drawing instead of something you are trying to hide.

It also takes a fixing that a 4 mm sheet would not: a batten frame behind, screws through the board, then the finish panel over the top. That is how it is done on a shopfront.

Six millimetre board, hotel corridor

Outside, under a canopy

Da Man Coffee, on a street in Ningbo. The fascia is gilded board on a frame, with the lettering fixed straight through it.

As metal cladding goes, sheltered exterior is the honest limit. Under a canopy, inside a recess, up a soffit where the rain never sits: fine, and it has been for years. A west wall taking sun and driving rain for a decade is a different question, and one we would want to answer before you specified it rather than after.

Where a facade does go ahead, the board is glued to a carrier and the carrier is fixed to the structure. The metal never touches a dissimilar metal, so there is no galvanic pair to think about at every bracket.

Da Man Coffee, Ningbo

Where it works, and where it does not

The board settles most of this. The finish only decides which room.

Ordering

Flexible and hard are priced separately, so say which one the job needs when you ask. Under 500 m² of a single finish the sheets ship in a plywood crate and the crate is charged on its own; above that they go on pallets. Send a wall drawing, a photo of the space, or the finish numbers you want to see, and we reply within one working day with a take-off and a delivered price. If the number has to come out of the area rather than the drawing, the price guide shows how it is put together.

Questions