What travertine is
A limestone that formed around mineral springs. Gas escaping through the water left cavities as the stone set, and those cavities are the whole of travertine's character: the layering, the direction, and the small holes across the face.
That formation also explains why travertine has a grain the way wood does. Cut one way it shows bands, cut the other it shows a cloudier field, and the two cuts of the same block can look like different stones.
Filled and unfilled travertine
The cavities are either left open or filled at the factory with a cement or resin matched to the stone. It is the first decision to make and the one that changes the floor most, and both are sold here.
Filled gives a continuous surface that reads closer to limestone and takes a honed finish cleanly. Unfilled keeps the holes, which is the look people mean when they say travertine, and the surface has texture you can feel. The word appears in the product title where it applies.
Tumbled, honed and split face
Tumbled is most of this range. The pieces are turned with abrasive until the edges round off and the face opens slightly, so a tumbled travertine terrace looks settled on the day it goes down.
Honed is flat and matte and belongs indoors, on a floor or a wall where a smooth surface is wanted. Split face is neither: the stone is broken along its layers instead of cut, leaving a deliberately uneven surface that goes on walls as cladding.
Colors and quarry names
The color names come from quarries rather than from a chart, so the same stone appears as Tuscany, Ivory, Latte and Light. All of those sit in the beige family and differ in how warm they run and how much movement they carry.
Walnut and Noce are the browns, Mocha sits between, Silver is the gray and Scabos is the banded multicolor. Beige leads the range by a wide margin, with brown and gray behind it.
What moves the price of travertine
Four things, and none of them is the word travertine. Thickness first: the range runs from around 1/2 inch for interior tile up to 2 inch for coping, and the thick pieces carry more stone. Then format, since a paver and a mosaic of the same stone are not priced alike.
Then the finish, because a honed and filled piece has had more done to it than a tumbled one. And last the grade, which is where the color and the density of the holes sit. Every product page carries its own figure per square foot; what this page can tell you is which of the four you are actually choosing between.
Formats and where each one goes
Interior tile is honed and usually filled, for floors and walls inside. Pavers are the tumbled pieces made to sit on a base outdoors, and pool coping is the edge piece sold in the same stone so the two match at the waterline.
Ledger panels are the split face pieces bonded into strips for cladding a wall, and the mosaics are the small formats for a border or a shower floor. The travertine pavers page has the outdoor half of this material in full.
Sizes and thickness
The sizes cluster at 12x24 and 16x24, with 12x12 and 6x12 behind them, and the thickness follows the format instead of the size. Interior tile runs around 1/2 inch, pavers sit at 1 1/4 inch, and coping goes to 2 inch because that edge takes more handling than the middle of a terrace does.
Natural stone is also not cut to a catalog dimension the way a fired tile is. A travertine piece comes out of a block at whatever size the block allowed, so some products here list a measurement and others list a range.
Shade variation from piece to piece
Most of this range is graded medium or high for shade variation, and that is the material behaving normally, not a fault. A block changes through its depth, so pieces cut from the top and the bottom of it differ, and pieces from two blocks differ more.
The consequence is about ordering more than about looks: a floor wants to come from one lot, and a repair two years later will not match invisibly. That is the trade for a stone that changes as you walk across it.
Travertine against the other soft stones
Travertine is a type of limestone, which is why the two names keep landing in the same search. What separates them is direction: travertine carries a grain and visible layering because gas escaped through it as it set, while a stone sold simply as limestone built up without that and reads as an even field.
Against marble the difference is what happened after. Marble is limestone that was recrystallized under heat and pressure, which is where its veining and its harder surface come from.
