Honed limestone
Twenty of the twenty two limestone slabs we carry are honed. One is polished, and one is honed and filled. No other material in our range comes anywhere near that concentration, and it is not a stocking accident.
Limestone is chosen for a matte surface. A honed limestone gives an even, light absorbing field, which is the quality the material is bought for, and that is why the trade finishes almost all of it that way. The honed surface here is not the budget option, it is the intended one. The occasional polished limestone is a deliberate departure from that and behaves as a brighter, more reflective stone.
Texture instead of veining
Where marble varies through veining and quartzite through banding and movement, limestone varies through what is embedded in it. Some are fine and almost uniform. Others carry visible shell and fossil fragments, and a few are conglomerates, made of rounded pebbles that were cemented together.
Ceppo is the clearest example of the last kind: a stone built from rounded stones, so it reads as a field of pebbles rather than as a continuous surface. That is the opposite of a breccia, which is made from angular broken pieces and which the brown slab page covers. The distinction matters because rounded and angular fragments read completely differently across a large surface.
Slab colors
Our range runs white, beige and gray with single stones in brown, green, yellow and a blue gray. Even the white limestones are not the bright white a marble reaches, and that is part of the point.
A limestone white is a warm off white that behaves like a plaster or a lime wash rather than like a polished stone. Rooms that want a soft pale surface without the hardness a white marble brings tend to end up here, and rooms that want the drama of marble do not.
Care and sealing
It is a calcium carbonate stone, so it shares marble's chemistry: acids etch it, and the care notes call for sealing. Because the surface is honed rather than polished, an etch shows less than it does on a reflective face, but the underlying reaction is the same one the marble page sets out.
Limestones also vary in density more than marbles do, from close grained stones to distinctly open ones, and that affects how a particular slab behaves. It is a question about the individual stone, not about the category.
Names and quarries
Jerusalem, Champagne, Ceppo, Mayfair and Euro all appear in our range, and between them they show how limestone is named. Some names mark a region the stone genuinely comes from, some mark a color, and some were invented for the trade.
Because limestone varies so much between quarries, the name matters more here than it does with a granite or a quartzite. Two stones both sold as limestone can differ in density, in color and in what is embedded in them far more than two marbles will, so the specific stone, not the material is what a decision should rest on.
Where limestone is used
Limestone turns up on walls, floors and vanity tops more often than it turns up spanning a kitchen, and the reason is the stone itself: it is softer than the quartzites and granites, so it goes where a surface is looked at more than it is worked on. Two thirds of our range is 1 1/4 inch, with the rest at 3/4 inch.
The beige slab page covers how limestone and travertine sit alongside the other stones in their color, and the stone slab overview sets out how lots and selection work.
