One stone that is already many colors
Slate, sandstone and the scabos travertines are multicolor before anyone does anything to them. A slate carries rust, gold, green and charcoal in the same slab because of the minerals in the original mud; a scabos travertine bands cream, walnut, silver and gray because the spring water changed while it was depositing.
These are the pieces where multicolor is a geological fact. Nothing was blended or selected, and that is why shade variation on them runs to moderate and high: the quarry cannot supply two identical ones.
Several stones assembled into one piece
The second route is construction. A mosaic sheet blending four stones, a ledger panel with strips of different material and a medallion cut from five marbles are all multicolor because somebody put them together that way.
That is a different proposition from the first. An assembled piece repeats, since the maker chose the recipe and can follow it again, and its colors were selected to work together rather than merely happening to occur in one rock. Medallions covers the assembled patterns properly.
One stone with more than one finish
Multi finish is the largest finish group on this page, and it is the third route to multicolor: the same marble supplied with some pieces polished, some honed and some tumbled in a single product.
Changing a finish changes how a stone returns light, and a surface that returns light differently reads as a different color even when the mineral is identical. A multi finish travertine can carry three apparent tones out of one quarry bed.
What multicolor does to a room
A multicolor surface sets the palette rather than fitting into one. Where a plain beige floor takes its cue from the walls and the joinery, a multicolor stone hands the room three or four colors it now has to work with.
That is why these pieces turn up as the single decided element in a scheme: a slate hearth, a scabos terrace, a medallion in an entry, a pebble shower floor. The room is built around them rather than the other way round.
The materials on this page
Travertine, marble, slate, pebble, glass, sandstone and porcelain all appear here, which is a wider material spread than any single-color page carries.
It happens because multicolor is the one color description every material can arrive at, and each of them gets there by its own route: a stone through its minerals, a mosaic through its blend, a glass sheet through its mix of tones.
Tumbled, natural and the textured faces
Behind multi finish sit natural, tumbled, gauged and split faces, with glossy, matte, polished and honed groups smaller than they would be on a plain color page.
Texture and multicolor go together for a practical reason. A rough or tumbled surface throws small shadows across itself, and those shadows read as further variation, so a textured multicolor stone looks richer than the same stone sawn flat.
Grout on a multicolor surface
The joint is a harder choice here than on a plain tile, because there is no single color in the piece to match it to.
Two approaches work. A joint picked from the darkest tone in the stone recedes and lets each piece read on its own, which suits a slate or a pebble. A joint taken from the palest tone outlines everything and turns the surface graphic. What rarely works is a mid gray chosen by default, since it matches nothing in the piece and reads as a fourth color nobody asked for.
Outdoors, and the large formats
Pool copings, pavers and ledger panels sit in this range alongside the tiles and sheets, and the size list runs from 6x6 up to 36 and 48 inch medallions.
Multicolor is at home outdoors. A terrace sits under changing light all day and a variegated stone answers that better than a flat one, which is why scabos travertine and slate have paved so many of them. The same logic runs the other way indoors: a multicolor floor in a room with one small window has only one light to work with and gives back far less of what it holds. Travertine pavers and pool and spa paving carry the outdoor pieces.
