A second-generation stone and tile shop.
Founded 2002. Seven people. One project at a time.
The shop inherited its father’s stubbornness.
Ardent was founded in 2002 by a mason whose father had been doing this work since the early seventies. The shop inherited the father’s tools, the father’s contacts at the quarries, and the father’s stubbornness about finishing one wall before starting the next.
Twenty-four years later, the shop runs seven people. The tools are different. The stubbornness is not.
One site at a time.
Most stone shops in Denver split attention across three or four concurrent jobs. A crew spends a week on your house, then disappears for two, then reappears to move on. The work that comes out of this pattern is workmanlike. It is rarely memorable.
Ardent does it the other way. A single crew works a single site until the job is done. This makes intake slow on the front end and fast on the back end. It also makes the work defensible, because it is finished.
Quarry visits before order forms.
Every piece of stone that goes into an Ardent project is hand-selected at the quarry. This is not a marketing position. It is a practical consequence of the kind of work we do.
A stone for a hearth is not interchangeable with the stone next to it on the pallet. Even on a single pallet of Manitou limestone, four slabs will have the color and grain the client wants and twenty will not. The only way to know is to be there. We are there. Usually before the delivery ticket is cut.
When we restore older work, we match the original source where we can — which means walking quarries on the Front Range to find stone that sits correctly next to hundred-year-old ashlar. When we cannot match the original, we choose a replacement that is honest about being new.
Seven people, not twenty.
Ardent employs seven people. Two are family members of the founder. One has been with the shop since 2005. The rest have been here between four and ten years. Nobody on the crew rotates through from a staffing agency. Nobody disappears midway through a job.
When you hire Ardent, you are hiring these seven people. The person you meet at the site visit is the person who will be in your house in October.
