Red slab materials
Sixteen of the twenty one red slabs here are marble, with three quartzites, a travertine and a granite alongside them. In our other colors the materials are spread far more evenly than that.
The reason is where red stone comes from. The classic red slabs are marbles and marble like limestones from a handful of long established European quarries, and the colors the other materials reach in red are narrower and rarer. If you are shopping for red stone, you are mostly shopping for marble whether you intended to or not.
Rosso, Rouge and Rojo
Rosso, Rouge, Rojo, Rosa and Red all appear across this collection. That is not decoration: the words track the quarries. Rosso points to Italy, Rouge to France and Belgium, Rojo to Spain, and the language a stone was named in is usually a reliable clue to where it was cut.
Red stone is one of the oldest continuously quarried materials in Europe, used in churches, palaces and public buildings for centuries, and the trade names traveled out of those countries with the stone. A name in this color usually tells you something real about origin, which is not true of most color ranges.
The range of red tones
The reds here run from deep oxblood through brick and terracotta to the pinks that carry a Rosa name. Most carry white or gray veining across the red ground, often heavily, and some are brecciated with fragments set in a red matrix.
That veining does more work in red than in any neutral. A red stone with dense white veining reads as a patterned surface first and a red one second, while a stone with little veining reads as a block of strong color. Those are very different things to put in a room, and the photographs do not always separate them.
Mostly polished, and why
Two thirds of this collection is polished, with honed and leathered accounting for the rest. Polishing deepens a red and brings the veining forward against it.
A honed red is a genuinely different stone to live with: quieter, closer to a painted or plastered surface, and easier in a room that is not built around it. It is the choice worth looking at when the red is going somewhere it has to coexist with other strong elements.
Where red stone goes
The thinner 3/4 inch stone slightly outnumbers the thicker 1 1/4 inch here, which points at what red is used for: feature walls, fireplace surrounds, vanity tops, table tops and panels, not long kitchen runs.
Used that way it does something no neutral can. A single red surface gives a room a center, and that is a job the color has been doing in European buildings for a very long time.
What red stone asks for
Most of this collection is marble, so the carbonate chemistry the marble page sets out applies to most of what is here. The three quartzites are the harder working stones in the group.
The stone slab page deals with how lots and selection work, and the brown slab page covers the warm stones that sit next to red in a scheme.
