Travertino · 01How the holes are made
The pitting is not stamped on and it is not a roller pattern. Material is laid in a broken, uneven pass so the trowel leaves voids behind it, then a second pass drags across and partly closes them, filling some, leaving others open, flattening the top of the surface while the holes stay below it. What you end up with is a face that is flat to a straight edge but pitted to a hand, which is exactly what a piece of honed travertine does. How open it reads is a decision rather than an accident. A heavily pitted wall and a lightly pitted one are the same tub and a different pair of hands, so it is worth settling that on a board first.
Travertino · 02Bands, blocks and joints
Real travertine arrives in slabs, so it has joints, and much of what makes stone look like stone is the rhythm of those joints. We can imitate that by taping out courses and working each block separately, leaving a fine recessed line between them, which suits a hall or a fireplace wall where you want the eye to read masonry. Or we leave it seamless, which is the thing plaster does that stone cannot: a whole room with no grout line anywhere, round corners and over curves in one continuous surface. Block size matters more than people expect. Courses that are too small make a wall look tiled, and courses too large stop reading as stone at all.
Travertino · 03Against the real thing
We are not going to tell you this is stone. It is not, and there are things stone does better: a cut slab has depth in the material itself and an edge you can run a hand along. What plaster does better is everything to do with weight and shape. It needs no lintel, no fixing and no substructure. It goes round a column or a curved wall where a slab would have to be cut and mitred. It arrives in a tub rather than on a pallet with a lifting problem attached to it. And it repairs: a chipped stone slab stays chipped, while a damaged plaster wall gets worked back in.
Travertino · 04Sealing and the open pores
Open pores are the whole point of the finish and they are also its weakness. They hold dust in a room nobody ventilates, and they hold grease in a kitchen, and neither comes back out with a wipe. Where a wall is going to meet hands, splashes or steam we seal it, which closes the surface without filling the texture and leaves it wipeable. A wax does something similar and leaves a little more warmth in the colour. On a hall wall or a chimney breast that nobody touches, bare is fine and will age the way stone ages. Decide by room rather than by preference, and tell us what the wall sits next to.
Travertino · 05Light is doing the work
A textured wall lives or dies by how it is lit. Light coming across the surface at a shallow angle throws a shadow into every pore, and the wall reads as stone from the far side of the room. Light coming straight at it from the middle of the ceiling flattens the pitting until you barely see it, and then you have paid for a texture you cannot read. If you are specifying travertino, put a wash of light down the wall: a recessed slot at the top, an uplighter, or a window running along it. Pale colours need that light more than dark ones, because there is less contrast to help them.
Where It Is The Wrong AnswerWhere travertino is the wrong answer
Keep it away from a hob. Grease goes into open pores and stays there, and a splashback wants a closed surface. The same goes for a narrow corridor you brush past with coats and bags, or a wall at toddler height. Inside a shower it is the wrong finish altogether, and tadelakt is the one built for that. And if you want a calm, flat, quiet wall, this is the noisiest finish we sell.
Yourself, Or UsLaying travertino yourself
This is more forgiving than a high polish in one way and less in another. It hides an imperfect wall and there is no burnish window to miss. What is hard is consistency: the pitting has a rhythm, and holding that rhythm across a long wall, or picking it up again the next morning, is the skill. Long walls are a two person job for exactly that reason. It is a good finish to learn at the Academy, and a risky one to improvise on a room you care about.
Order a sample board at the pitting level you want and stand it against your floor in daylight, because this finish is read by shadow. When it looks right, ring 07592 929191 and tell us about the wall.
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