Where brown comes from in a marble
Marble begins as limestone and becomes marble under heat and pressure. Whatever else was in that limestone goes through the change with it, and iron compounds are the usual source of a warm color: yellow through to tan, chocolate and near black as the quantity rises.
Clay minerals do the rest, muddying the ground and giving the stone the softer, less crystalline look that separates a brown marble from a white one at a glance. The marble tile page covers how the colors sit across the whole material.
Emperador, light and dark
Emperador is a Spanish stone, quarried inland from the Mediterranean coast in the southeast of the country, and it is the name most of this range carries. It is sold in two grades that are two different stones to look at.
Emperador Dark is a deep chocolate ground crossed by irregular pale veins. Emperador Light is a tan to gray-brown with heavier, more broken veining and more movement in it. The dark one reads as a single field from across a room; the light one reads as a pattern.
Why the veining meets at angles
Most of the brown marbles here are brecciated, which means the original rock was broken into angular fragments and then cemented back together before the stone was metamorphosed.
That history is what you are looking at. The pale lines running through an Emperador are the cement between fragments, so they meet at angles and stop abruptly where a white marble's veining would sweep. It is also why shade variation on this page reads medium to high: a broken pattern has no way to repeat.
What a finish does to a brown marble
Polished is the leading finish, ahead of fine textured, honed and one multi finish group, and the finish moves a dark stone further than it moves a pale one.
A polished brown goes deeper and warmer, because a reflective surface returns the color saturated. Honing the same stone lifts it several shades toward gray and flattens the contrast with its veining, so a honed Emperador Dark and a polished one can be hard to recognize as the same marble.
The formats and the half inch
12x24 leads the size list, then 18x18 and 12x12, with 5 1/2 inch squares, a 2 3/4x5 1/2 brick and a narrow 1 9/16x18 plank.
Thickness runs 3/8 and 1/2 inch here, and the half inch matters where this tile meets another one. A floor laid in 1/2 inch marble sits higher than the 3/8 inch standard, so a threshold into an adjoining room needs the difference taken up underneath or covered by a transition.
Brown marble against the stones near it
Travertine covers the same warm ground with a different surface: it is a porous, layered stone with open voids, where a brown marble is dense and crystalline. Travertine tile is the range next to this one.
For the same color in a fired body there is brown porcelain, which repeats exactly and has no chemistry to think about, and for mosaic sheets in the color, brown mosaic tile carries the small formats.
Where brown marble goes
A floor, a fireplace surround, a shower wall, a stair tread, and the border or field of a patterned floor, which is the oldest use of a dark marble and still the most effective one.
A dark stone also carries a room differently from a pale one: it absorbs light where white marble throws it back, so a brown floor grounds a bright room and a brown wall closes a small one in. Marble mosaics and marble slabs cover the other formats.
