What the stone is
A fine-grained pale limestone, cream to soft gold, quarried in the hills around Jerusalem. It carries faint tonal drift rather than veining, and small fossil traces turn up in it because a limestone is made from the remains of living things in a shallow sea.
Limestone and marble are close relatives and the difference is heat. A marble is a limestone that was recrystallized under pressure and temperature; a limestone never went through that, so it keeps a softer, more open texture and a matte character. Limestone tile sets out the material in full.
The building ordinance
The requirement dates from the British administration immediately after the First World War, and its purpose was to keep a city of very different neighborhoods looking like one place.
It worked to an unusual degree. Jerusalem is one of the few large cities in the world with a single material running through almost all of it, and the warm pale color that everybody recognizes in photographs of it is this stone in late light.
Light, gold and the other Jerusalem stones
The quarries around the city produce a family of limestones rather than a single one, and the trade separates them mainly by tone: light and bone at the pale end, gold and cream in the middle, with grayer stones alongside them.
Light is the palest of them and the most neutral, which is why it travels furthest as an interior stone. The golds carry more iron and read distinctly warm, and they are the ones most associated with the building facades the city is known for.
Honed, across the range
Every piece here is honed, which is the finish a limestone is normally supplied in.
A limestone will take a polish and it rarely holds one the way a marble does, because the grain is softer and more open. Honing gives it an even matte surface that shows the color and the texture without pretending to be something it is not.
The formats here
12x12, 18x18, a 4x4 and a 2 3/4x5 1/2 brick, at 3/8 and 1/2 inch thick.
That spread covers the two ways the stone is used. The larger squares make a floor; the 4x4 and the brick make a wall, and a small honed limestone brick laid in an offset pattern is about as close as a modern backsplash gets to the surface of an old building.
Where the fossils come from
Small pale shapes appear in the face of these pieces and they are shell fragments and other remains from the sea floor the sediment settled on.
They are part of the stone rather than a flaw in it. A limestone with visible fossil traces is a limestone that has not been selected into blandness, and on a pale honed surface they read as faint texture rather than as marks.
Where Jerusalem Light goes
A floor, a hall, a bathroom, a fireplace surround, a courtyard wall and a backsplash in the smaller formats. It suits rooms that want warmth without a pattern, which is a narrower requirement than it sounds and a hard one to meet with a veined stone.
Limestone tile is the material across every quarry, beige tile and mosaic the warm neutrals in every material, and travertine tile the nearest relative in the catalog.
