The sill and the corner shelf
A kitchen window sitting in a tiled wall needs a sill, and a 6x72 length of honed travertine is what that is: one piece long enough to cross the opening without a joint in the middle of it.
The corner shelf is the other finishing piece, a quarter-round shelf with a 9 inch radius cut to sit in an internal corner. Neither of these is a tile and neither turns up in a field, which is why they are easy to forget until the wall is nearly finished.
The mosaic sheets and their chip sizes
Mosaic sheets carry nearly all of this range, with a single field tile alongside them. The marble tile backsplash page sets out why a backsplash band divides into small pieces; what is specific to travertine is which small pieces it comes as.
The chip list runs from a 3/4 inch square through a 2x4 brick and a 1x1 rock face to a hexagon and a tumbled pebble pattern. That is a wide spread for nine products, and it is the range that decides how much of the stone's texture the wall shows.
Honed and filled leads here
Travertine arrives with natural voids in it and is sold either filled or open, and on this page the filled and honed pieces carry most of the range. The travertine tile page explains what filling is and what it changes.
What is specific to a backsplash is the reading distance. A wall behind a counter is looked at from two feet, so the state of the surface is the first thing anybody sees, and an open textured travertine reads as a much stronger decision there than the same stone does across a floor.
Rock face and pebble at the other end
Two pieces go the other way deliberately. A 1x1 rock face mosaic has each chip split rather than sawn, so the face stands proud and the wall carries real relief. A tumbled pebble pattern does the same thing with rounded stone.
Those are accent products in a backsplash. A full run of relief behind a cooktop is a great deal of texture at close range, and both pieces are more often used as a band or a panel with a flat field around them.
The travertine names
Tuscany Ivory and Tuscany Classic are the pale creams, Silver and Silver Horizon are the grays, Noce is the walnut brown, and Durango Cream sits between the creams and the browns.
Those are trade names for specific quarried stones and the travertine tile page sets out what separates them. On a backsplash the useful thing to know is that the pale ones show less of the veining and the banding, which is what keeps a small chip from reading as busy.
Travertine against marble here
Both are carbonate stones and both arrive in the same creams and grays, so the choice on a backsplash comes down to the surface. Travertine has voids; marble does not.
That means a travertine backsplash carries texture even when it is filled and honed, where a marble one is flat and relies on its veining. Marble tile backsplash is the other range, and the two are rarely a close decision once somebody has seen both at arm's length.
Reading the listing
Two fields matter more here than on a field tile page. The type tells you whether a piece is a mosaic, a field tile, a sill or a shelf, and this range carries all four.
The size tells you whether a figure is the sheet or the chip: a 12 5/8x12 5/8 is a mesh sheet and the 1x1 in the same title is the chip on it. That distinction is where most of the confusion on a mosaic listing comes from.
