Crazy paving in Perth is built rather than laid, and it is mostly pool surrounds and courtyards. Every piece is cut to the two or three it touches on the day, which is why the labour and not the stone is what you are paying for.
Get a price for crazy paving
A photo of the area and a rough size is enough to price it.
Crazy paving arrives as irregular flat stone on a pallet, in random shapes and mixed sizes. None of it fits anything until somebody makes it fit. That is the job.
We lay it wet on a full mortar bed, working out from the pool edge or the most visible line, cutting each piece to the two or three it touches and keeping the joint width consistent as we go. A consistent joint is the difference between crazy paving that looks designed and crazy paving that looks like broken concrete.
The joint is then grouted rather than sanded. On an irregular surface a sand joint has nothing holding it in, and the first hose or heavy rain takes it out.
It is the most forgiving surface we lay on an awkward shape and the least forgiving on a plain rectangle, which is the opposite of what most people expect.
A kidney or freeform pool is where crazy paving is genuinely better than the alternatives. There is no course to keep straight and no cut that reads as wrong, so the shape stops being a problem and starts being the design.
Older Perth homes rarely have a square outdoor space. Crazy paving absorbs a wall that is out of parallel without anybody noticing, where a rectangular paver would show the taper down one edge.
Riven stone with a random layout reads as a garden surface rather than a floor. Beside a lot of planting or an older brick house it sits better than a large-format modern paver does.
We do not lay crazy paving where a car goes. The pieces vary in thickness and the small ones have very little bearing area, so a wheel loads a point rather than a plane. It is a foot-traffic surface and we will say so rather than take the job.
Crazy paving is the only surface we quote where the stone is the cheap part. A pallet of irregular flat stone is often less per square metre than a cut paver, and then it takes two to three times as long to lay.
The reason is that every piece is cut twice. Once roughly, to get it near its place, and once properly, to the pieces it actually meets. A square metre of crazy paving can be twenty cuts. A square metre of 600 by 600 porcelain is sometimes none.
There is also a sorting stage nobody talks about. The pallet has to be laid out and read before anything is bedded, so the big pieces land in the open field and the small ones fill the awkward runs. Skipping that is how you end up with a surface that is all offcuts in one corner.
Crazy paving is the one surface we lay where the stone is the cheap part and the labour is nearly all of it, so the shape of your area matters more than its size.
A freeform pool surround with a long curved edge takes far more cutting per metre than an open courtyard of the same area. Cutting is the job on this surface, so edge length is the single biggest driver.
Every step, garden edge and narrow strip is another set of cuts to fit. A plain rectangle in crazy paving costs less per metre than a shape with a lot of returns in it.
Toodyay, quartzite, bluestone and slate are not the same price per pallet, and the gap between them is real. The irregular material a quarry cannot sell as tile is usually the most affordable.
Lifting an old surface and carting it away is priced separately from laying the new one, and on a bonded old slab it is a genuine part of the job.
Almost every failed crazy paving job in Perth failed in the joint or in the layout, not in the stone.
The default Perth pool stone. Cool underfoot, grippy wet, and sealed before we leave.
Pale, local and soft. Right against a limestone wall or under an alfresco, wrong on a driveway.
Near zero absorption, exact sizing, never needs sealing. The low maintenance answer.
A photo of the area and a rough size is enough. If we think another material would serve you better we will say so, and say why.