Material · 30 June 2026 · 4 min
Travertine before Instagram
Travertine has had a strange decade. A stone that spent most of the twentieth century being used for floors, façades and the occasional heroic coffee table is now the wallpaper of a certain kind of feed. It is easy to become tired of it. It is worth remembering why the designers of the sixties and seventies reached for it in the first place.
The answer is its faults. Travertine is a limestone laid down by mineral springs, and the process leaves it full of small voids. Most stones are chosen for their evenness. Travertine was chosen because it was not even, because the pitting gave the surface a dryness and a shadow that polished marble could not offer.
Filled or unfilled
The first question we ask of any travertine piece is whether the voids have been filled. Filled travertine is smooth, practical and slightly dead. Unfilled travertine is alive, catches dust and asks for a certain tolerance. Neither is wrong. But the pieces we love were nearly always left open, because the designers who used the stone wanted the texture, not the convenience.
Colour matters as well. Roman travertine tends towards a warm ivory. Other quarries produce cooler, greyer stone, and the difference decides whether a table sits quietly in a room or argues with it.
Most stones are chosen for their evenness. Travertine was chosen because it was not.
How to live with it
Do not seal it into a plastic shine. Accept that a glass will leave a ring and that a ring will eventually become part of the surface. A travertine table from 1974 that has been kept perfect looks like a reproduction. One that has been used looks like what it is.