No veining means the form carries it
A marble basin is looked at partly for the stone: the veining runs over the outside and down into the bowl and the object is a piece of a block. A limestone has almost none of that.
So what a limestone basin has to offer is its shape. The proportion of the bowl, the thickness of the rim and the way the outside was worked are all there is, which makes it a more demanding object to design and a much easier one to live with. Marble sinks is the figured alternative.
The worked exteriors
Honed leads the finishes, with honed and filled, honed with a hand split face, honed and hand-chiseled and a honed matte among them.
Every one of those describes a single object finished two ways: the bowl honed because it holds water, the outside split or chiseled because that is the part anybody looks at. On a stone with no figure of its own, that worked exterior is doing the work the veining would do on a marble.
A 48 inch trough
One piece here is given as 48 inches long, 16 wide and 2.5 deep, which is a trough rather than a basin.
A shallow rectangular vessel carved from a single block is a different object from a bowl: it serves two people, it reads as a horizontal line rather than a form, and the shallow depth is what makes it possible, since a deeper trough of that length would need a much larger block.
The two-height piece
Another listing gives a diameter with two heights, 8 inches at one point and 6 at another.
That describes a basin whose rim is not level: higher at the back and lower at the front, so the bowl reads as a sloped form rather than a cylinder. It is the kind of thing carved stone does easily and a fabricated material does not, because the shape is removed from a block rather than assembled.
Limestone against travertine in a bathroom
Two of the pieces here are travertine, which sits in the same collection because the two stones are close relatives.
Both are calcium carbonate. A travertine was deposited rapidly at a spring and has open voids; a limestone settled slowly on a sea floor and has almost none. The travertine is warmer and more textural, the limestone finer and quieter. Travertine sinks covers the other tradition.
How the sizes are written
The figures here give width, length and height together, or a diameter with a height, depending on the shape of the piece.
That is normal on carved stone and it is worth reading carefully, because a rectangular basin and a round vessel use different notations for the same kind of information. For a vessel the figures that matter are how much counter the bowl covers and how far the rim stands above it.
Where a limestone basin goes
A bathroom vanity, a powder room, a cloakroom and a wall hung position in a room where the basin is meant to be quiet rather than the feature.
Sinks is the whole basin range, and limestone tile the same stone in flat formats.
