Diaries of a Concrete Factory

For more than eighty years, Ebema has shaped the Belgian landscape in concrete. Across three generations of family ownership, the company has built a deep technical knowledge of prefabrication — investing continuously in production, engineering and material research.

CustomConcrete grew from within that legacy as something more focused and more intimate: a studio inside a factory. It is the place where the standard product gives way to the singular piece — or to a small custom series in a bespoke colour or geometry. Where the brief arrives with a spatial ambition rather than a catalogue reference, and the answer is shaped element by element.

Inside the workshop, concrete is in constant transformation. Recipes are adjusted by grams, pigments tested under changing daylight, aggregates washed and recombined until the right surface emerges. Prototypes move between CAD drawings, mould-makers, casting tables and finishing stations before reaching their final form.

The work moves across scales: from precision-cut tiles only centimetres thick to monolithic pieces weighing several tonnes. We work across three production methods — cast, pressed and direct-demoulded concrete — and a wide palette of finishes: polished, washed, sandblasted, hammered, smooth as cast, or textured by the mould itself.

What defines the process is not only the machinery or the production capacity, but the people behind it. CustomConcrete is a small, consistent team — engineers, designers, CAD-drafters, mould-makers, finishers and project leads, with decades of combined experience and a long history of working together. Every project begins with a conversation: a sketch, a sample, a brief that arrives without an obvious answer. From there we work closely with architects, artists and clients through every stage — refining the mix, prototyping the geometry, supervising the cast, accompanying the install on site.

The factory is not simply where things are produced. It is where dialogue becomes material.