Following three years of product development, Athena is able to bring high-end porcelain to the mainstream housebuilding market, and founder, Adam Miles is fired up about it. Gill Oliver reports.
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen is not a phrase you’d associate with Adam Miles, but the founder and managing director of Worcestershire-based Athena Surfaces is ‘fired up’.
Athena, which specialises in manufacturing and installing worktops for housebuilders, already has form for disrupting the market and now it’s at it again. This time, it is offering high-grade porcelain worktops at an affordable price to bring the product within reach of housebuilders and developers. And while rivals sit back and wait to see whether the economy improves, Miles is busily expanding.
Next month, his company moves to a four-acre site off the M5 in Worcestershire that is four times bigger than its current base, enabling a 200-a-day kitchen worktop output. Not bad for a bloke who, 10 years ago, launched the business from a shed with nothing but a bridge saw.
“We’ve been supplying housebuilders and developers for a decade now, so it’s time to gear up for the next decade,” Miles says.
The move sees a reconfiguring of manufacturing and processing technology and equipment to support the new emphasis on porcelain. At the heart of this switch is Athena’s new partnership with Italian company Mirage Granito Ceramico, part of the Atlas Concorde group, which has been manufacturing porcelain products for more than half a century.
Mirage has just opened a design centre in London and Miles says he can’t wait to take existing and potential customers to see the porcelain worktops for themselves.
“By working with Mirage, we’ve accelerated the process of manufacturing high-end porcelain so it’s affordable for housebuilders,” he says.
Athena is also a long-term supplier to the retail sector including well-known brands such as Magnet and Smallbone of Devizes.
“We’ve been putting in porcelain for high-end kitchen brands for years but the costs have been notoriously high, which I believe is down to the main brands overcharging. Now we’re bringing this product to housebuilders for less than they might pay for some quartz options – top quality Italian porcelain at prices you’d expect to pay for Asian products.”
Athena has already launched Mirage porcelain worktops into Persimmon Homes – including at the housebuilder’s show suite at its Paddocks development in Essex. The porcelain worktops have also been snapped up by Avant Homes and will launch into Bellway soon, as well as several regional housebuilders such as Lioncourt Homes.
Quartz had been the go-to product until recently, but a ban by the Australian state and Ikea down under, due to concerns about potential silicosis risk, has caused a rethink for some, especially those with a duty of care like housebuilders.
Keen to stay several steps ahead, Miles has considered the repercussions if the ban or anti-quartz mood comes to the UK, and, after years of research, he’s convinced porcelain is a safer and smarter long-term bet.
“The issues around quartz and silicosis made us look at all of the other options and now we have a very high-end alternative, which, thanks to the modernisation of manufacturing processes, can be made into worktops at a similar price as quartz,” he says.
There are less obvious bonuses too, in that porcelain is considered to be more sustainable. Quartz has resin added during processing and resin isn’t completely straightforward to dispose of, meaning it cannot be recycled.
“Porcelain is made in a very different way: clay and water compressed and then fired,” says Miles. “If you wanted to, you could recycle it. It’s also got a much longer lifecycle and is a much better product for worktops for a multitude of reasons such as aesthetics and durability.”
He points to Bologna-based Mirage’s impressive environmental and sustainability credentials, including the collection and reuse of rainwater via its own artificial lake, recovery of heat from kilns, and recycling of up to 60% of materials used in production.
Athena, which also makes and installs natural stone and sintered stone kitchen tops, runs targeted training and demonstration programmes to help housebuilders and developers maximise upsell opportunities.
Miles explains: “When we work with a housebuilder, we look at all their sites across all regions and figure out how to boost penetration rates. Rather than winning the contract and moving on, it’s more a case of: ‘Look, you’re at 4%, we believe we can get you 10% in the first year, and this is how we’re going to do it.”
“We don’t waste time going into sites that are doing well, we drill down and ask why a specific site is selling only 2%. It often turns out they don’t have samples, or someone’s on leave and the person covering doesn’t know about the products, and after we go in and fix this, their penetration rate spikes.”
Developer clients can also have access to an online portal where they can track how many plots have upgraded worktops.
There’s no doubting Miles’ genuine love of porcelain – he waxes lyrical about its beauty, purity and endurance – but there are also many other practical reasons why he’s backing porcelain. For starters, during processing it can be effectively ‘printed’, making it easy to replicate any surface from wood or concrete through to limestone, marble or travertine. Mirage porcelain comes in 3.2m sheets, which means fewer joints and a smoother look, design-wise. And it’s not just about sleek good looks. Porcelain, crafted from high-grade clays and fired at extreme temperatures, is incredibly hard-wearing, low maintenance, and scratch- and heat-resistant.
“It’s already popular with high-end kitchen studios because it is a designer’s dream – it can be produced in a really wide range of colours and patterns,” Miles explains. “The ability to supply multiple thicknesses and sizes also means we can create that seamless high-end look customers are after. We can have worktops in 20mm, walls and sinks made out of 6mm and 12mm and floor tiles, indoor and outdoor, all in the same finish for fantastic value.
“Porcelain doesn’t stain or burn or melt when exposed to hot kitchenware, making it ideal for a busy kitchen. You can take a piping hot Le Creuset dish out of the oven and plonk it straight onto a porcelain worktop, without worrying.
It’s obviously a great solution for housebuilders but the barrier has, up until now, been cost: “No one could make it cheap enough to work with housebuilders’ margins,” Miles points out. “We started this project three-and-a-half years ago when we saw what was happening with quartz and it’s taken us this long to reach the point where we can go to a housebuilder and say: ‘we’ve got this product which will be a similar price and has all these other amazing benefits, too’. The value proposition to our and their customers is huge.”
As for expanding now, when others are lying low, his message is simple and direct: “When 2025 hits and the market heats up again, we don’t want to lose valuable time ramping up and moving factories. By doing this now, we’ll be in a position where we’ve got the best kit and the best product and we’ll be ready to go.”
