Where travertine pavers are used
Three surfaces take most of this range: a pool surround, a patio, and the path that joins them. What they have in common is that they are walked on barefoot or in wet shoes, and that is the condition the tumbling is for.
Tumbling is a finishing process. No grade is implied by it. The stone is turned with abrasive until the sharp edges come off and the face is left slightly open and irregular. A tumbled paver reads softer than a sawn one, which is why a travertine terrace looks settled on the day it is laid.
Travertine around a pool
Pool coping belongs to this range, in the same stone and the same finish as the field. That matters at the one edge everybody looks at: a coping in a different lot or a different finish is the detail that gives a pool away.
The stone is also light. Beige leads the color range here by a wide margin, with brown and gray behind it, and a light surface behaves differently in full sun than a dark one does. Anything beyond that, the maximum surface temperature or how a particular piece drains, belongs to the product and to whoever builds the deck.
Paver sizes and the French pattern
The sizes run from 6x12 up to 24x24, with 16x24 the largest single group and 12x24 behind it. A larger format means fewer joints across a terrace, which reads calmer from a distance and takes longer to set out at the edges.
The French pattern is the exception to the size field, and travertine is where it turns up most: it is the layout people picture when they picture a stone terrace. How the pattern is sold is on the paver page.
Tumbled, brushed and honed travertine
Tumbled is the bulk of the range and the one made for outside. Brushed keeps the sawn edge but works the face with wire until it is textured, so it reads tighter than tumbled and still not smooth. Honed is flat and matte, and it turns up here mostly on coping and on interior pieces that have to meet a tumbled field.
A split face appears on a handful of products, where the stone is broken along its bed and the surface is deliberately uneven. That is a cladding face, made for a wall.
Color on a terrace
Color changes a terrace more than the size does, because it is what the eye reads first from the house and because an outdoor surface is seen in full sun rather than under a lamp. A beige that looks warm indoors reads paler outside, and a gray that looks neutral reads cooler.
Which quarry name means which color is set out on the travertine page, since the names belong to the stone itself.
Paver thickness
Two thicknesses carry almost the whole range and they sit close together: 1 1/4 inch and 1.18 inch, which is the same board expressed in two habits of measurement. Above those is a group near 2 inch, and that is where the coping sits.
What the thickness does decide is the base it goes on and how the edges are held, and that is a question for whoever is building the terrace, not one a product page can settle. The stone pavers range covers the other materials that answer the same brief.
Travertine outside and travertine inside
The same stone is sold as an interior tile, cut thinner and finished differently, and the two ranges are not interchangeable. A travertine tile is thinner and usually honed or filled; a paver is thicker and tumbled, and it is the one made to sit on a base outdoors.
Where a project runs from a kitchen out onto a terrace, the two are chosen together so the color carries through. Porcelain pavers answer the same brief in a fired body, with a fixed thickness and no variation between pieces, which is a different set of priorities and not a lesser one.
