Travertine Sinks

Honed and filled is most of this range

Honed and filled is the largest finish group here by a wide margin, ahead of plain honed and polished.

Travertine has open cavities running through it and a bowl holds water, so the cavities get closed with a cement or resin and the surface is then honed flat. It is the one application where leaving them open makes no sense, which is why the filled version dominates a sink range and not a floor range. Sinks is the full range, stone and fabricated together.

The worked exteriors

Behind the flat finishes sit combinations that belong to carved stone alone: honed and sandblasted, honed with a hand split face, honed and hand-chiseled, and rough-honed.

Each describes one object finished two ways. The bowl is honed and filled because it holds water; the outside is blasted, split or chiselled because that is the part anybody looks at. A travertine takes all of those cleanly because the stone is layered and already irregular.

Why travertine takes texture better than marble

A marble is dense and crystalline, so a chiselled face on one reads as an interruption to a smooth material.

A travertine is layered, porous and banded to begin with. Working the surface exaggerates what is already there rather than contradicting it, which is why the rough finishes concentrate in travertine basins and the polished ones concentrate in marble.

The colors run wider than marble

Beige leads by a long way, then brown, gray, red and gold, with a few mixed descriptions behind them.

That red and gold end does not exist in marble at this scale. Travertine takes its color from iron carried in the water that deposited it, and more iron gives deeper and redder stone, so a travertine range reaches warmer tones than a marble one can. Beige travertine tile has the same stone in tile format.

Vessels, rectangles and pedestals

The size fields carry three notations. A vessel gives a diameter and a height. A rectangular basin gives width, length and height. A few carry a height of thirty three inches, which is a freestanding pedestal carved column and bowl from one block.

Reading one notation as another is the commonest mistake on a stone sink page. For a vessel the figures that matter are how much counter the bowl covers and how far the rim stands above it. Marble sinks sets out the same notations.

One vendor, one workshop

Every piece on this page comes from a single supplier, which is normal for carved stone and unusual for anything else in this catalog.

Carved basins are not a line a factory runs; they are made by workshops where people carve stone by hand. That is why the finish descriptions are so specific, with terms like hand split face and hand-chiseled appearing at all. Each one records what a particular pair of hands did to a particular block.

Travertine against marble in a bathroom

Both are carbonates and both respond to acid. Travertine is the softer and more absorbent of the two, and it is warmer in every tone it comes in.

A marble basin is the formal object and a travertine one is the textural, weathered, Mediterranean one. Whatever a particular piece requires comes from the manufacturer's data on its own product page. Travertine tile carries the material in full.