Tom Ralston Concrete, Santa Cruz, Calif.
A passion for innovation keeps this third-generation contractor excited about the trade. Ralston learned the concrete trade, working beside his dad on driveways, curbs and gutters, sidewalks, and small foundations.
by Brad Jeske

Northern California’s scenic coastline has drawn many local teenagers to a life of surfing and adventure, and Tom Ralston was no exception. His father, however, had different ideas for his future.

“When I started surfing,” Ralston says, “my father said he wasn’t going to have a beach bum living at his house.” That was the summer of 1964… almost 40 years ago.

Consequently, Ralston learned the concrete trade, working beside his dad on driveways, curbs and gutters, sidewalks, and small foundations. “Every once in a while I would get to jackhammer concrete with a big 90-pound jackhammer. As a boy I was really short, so that thing was about as high as I was.”

But as a third generation concrete contractor (his grandfather, Wilbur Thomas Ralston, started the business in 1928), Ralston harbored the idea of quitting the business altogether. “I was sick and tired of the same mundane concrete,” he says. “If it wasn’t for decorative concrete I wouldn’t be in the industry today.”

Ralston took over the company when his father retired in 1989. “My father had actually retired in 1987 and the business was almost dormant — until I was asked to do a decorative project for a Victorian restoration project that had some cool concrete work,” he says. He put a small three-man team together and finished the project — and found a particular thrill from building a team and doing creative concrete on his own.

Fifteen years later, Tom Ralston Concrete, based in Santa Cruz, Calif., incorporates four divisions. The structural division handles hillsides, complicated foundations, structural slabs, and retaining walls. The decorative division does stamped concrete, patios, pool decks and hardscapes. The masonry division takes care of brick, blocks, flagstones, pizza ovens, firepits and fireplaces. Finally, the specialty division offers acid staining, thin-topping overlays, decorative interior floors over radiant heat, polished concrete and concrete countertops.

“We are involved in many divisions of concrete and masonry, and it allows us to create a unique blending of hardscape surfaces,” Ralston says.

Many creative innovations have helped set his company apart from the rest. For example, he was asked to repair a wall that was a favorite spot for skateboarders who used it to practice their jumping and “railing” techniques. Ralston created a mold of a seashell, cast a series of replicas with Ardex polymer concrete, coated them with a copper-laden epoxy and then attached them to the wall with rebar. The wall’s straight edge was now gone, and the disgruntled skateboarders moved on.

Another project that pushed the creative envelope was the re-creation of an ocean-like setting within an entire home interior. Interior concrete walls were constructed to look like cliffs with natural fissures, and multiple blendings of acid-stained concrete that incorporated beach glass, sea shells and aquarium sand were used on the floors, along with sandblasting and stenciling. Many of the surfaces were juxtaposed with stainless steel, exotic hardwood and stucco, creating dramatic results. The project caused a stir among locals who visited the home and has also been featured in more than a half dozen magazines and newspapers.

On another project, Ralston got into a swimming pool with a group of plasterers and had his helper hand him buckets of various color hardeners so that he could throw and mix them into the white plaster mix. “After about an hour of that those plaster guys wanted to kill me,” Ralston says, but he finally convinced them, in his best Spanish, that the owner wouldn’t pay anyone unless he was able to make the swimming pool look like an ocean tide pool. They allowed him to continue and the results were applauded.

Ralston uses a myriad of different coloring systems, including dust-on colors, acid and acrylic stains, and universal tints, as well as colors from a multitude of different manufacturers. “On certain projects we have gone to art stores and bought tubes of acrylic paint, mixed them, and used them with sea sponges to go onto floors,” he says. “Then we sealed them with a good polyurethane.” On one project, Ralston ran out of black color and used shoe polish. “That was six years ago and it is still black.”