Stone in interior design: marble, onyx, travertine and porcelain stoneware

Why stone is chosen by eye, not from a catalogue

A catalogue shows the type of stone: ‘Calacatta marble’, ‘classic travertine’. Your wall will be assembled from specific slabs, and their pattern will not match the catalogue picture — it never repeats anywhere at all.

Stone is quarried in blocks and cut into slabs. Neighbouring slabs from the same block look similar; slabs from different blocks don't — the density of the veining, the background, sometimes even the tone, all change. That's why stone follows a separate route within a project: choosing specific slabs at the supplier's warehouse, marking them, reserving them, and only then laying them out on the wall elevations.

It's possible to skip this step. Then the decision about how the home's main wall will look gets made by a warehouse worker.

Marble in interior design: where it works, and where it doesn't

Marble is chosen for its pattern — bold, directional, capable of carrying a wall without a single extra device. It works where people look at it: an accent wall, a fireplace surround, a bedhead, a splashback in an area used carefully.

Marble's problem isn't price, it's porosity. It reacts to acids: lemon juice, wine and glass cleaner leave matt marks that can't be wiped away, only ground out. The polish dulls over time, and after a few years the surface looks different from how it did on handover day.

Hence a practical rule: the closer the stone sits to water, food and household chemicals, the more caution is needed with natural marble.

A marble slab: what to check at the warehouse

A slab is a panel cut from a block: usually 2.6–3.2 m long and 1.6–2 m high, though there's no single standard — the block dictates the size. Choosing one means checking four things.

• The whole pattern. The slab needs to be seen standing upright and in full, not as a fragment on a phone screen: a vein that looks beautiful in the corner can end up in an awkward spot once it's on the wall.
• Whether the slabs come from the same block. If a wall is assembled from two or more slabs, they need to be neighbouring pieces — otherwise the join will read as a change of material.
• Cracks and vein fissures. Some of the veining in marble is healed cracking. It's acceptable, but it's worth knowing its position in advance.
• Thickness and reserve. Twenty millimetres, thirty, with a reinforced front edge: this determines both how the edge reads and how heavy the structure is.

The slab is reserved before cutting. You can't buy ‘the same one’ a month later: the block has already been cut and sold on.

Onyx in interior design: backlighting for translucency

Onyx is more translucent than other commonly used stones: light travels several centimetres into it and reveals its layers, turning a wall into a source of light. Thin white marble and certain quartzites also work when backlit, but onyx gives the most striking effect.

A clarification that saves time during procurement: in interior design, ‘onyx’ isn't the chalcedony gemstone but onyx marble, a banded calcite deposit. Hence its kinship with travertine: both are carbonate deposits, which is why they sit well together in one interior.

This is a striking but demanding technique. It needs an even light source with no visible hot spots, a gap between the stone and the light, access for replacing bulbs, and an understanding that during the day, with the backlight off, the wall looks different — calmer and more muted. All of this is planned in the technical documentation: backlighting can't be added to a finished wall.

Onyx is softer than marble and doesn't hold up well in working areas. Its place is where it's looked at: a bathroom, a bedroom, a niche in the living room.

Travertine in interior design: a warm alternative to marble

Travertine is chosen when marble feels too formal. It has a porous texture and a calm beige-ochre tone, doesn't shine, and doesn't demand a sense of occasion from the interior.

The pores are both its distinguishing feature and its weakness. They are either filled or left open: in the first case the surface is easier to maintain, in the second the texture that made you choose the stone in the first place is preserved. The decision is made before ordering, not on site.

Marble-look porcelain stoneware: when it's more honest than stone

Marble-look porcelain stoneware is requested more often than any natural stone, and there's a reason for that. Modern printing reproduces the pattern convincingly, and the material is easier to live with: water absorption for this group of tiles is no more than 0.5%, it isn't etched by acids, and in a matt finish it needs no sealing. A polished finish does: polishing opens up microscopic pores. The term ‘porcelain stoneware’ itself is largely a trade name: the standards don't define it separately but classify tiles by water absorption.

It differs in two respects. The pattern repeats from tile to tile — over a large area this is noticeable if the layout isn't planned carefully. And in most collections, the pattern is printed onto the surface: the edge and any cut reveal a different base tone. The exception is full-body porcelain stoneware: it costs more, but a cut edge doesn't give it away.

The practical conclusion: hallway flooring, bathroom walls and flooring, a working kitchen's splashback — porcelain stoneware is usually the more sensible choice here. An accent wall, a fireplace surround, an island worktop that gets looked at — that's the territory of natural stone.

A natural stone worktop: what to ask before ordering

A worktop is the most heavily used stone element in a home, and it raises the most questions.

• The type of stone. Quartzite and granite tolerate kitchen use, marble doesn't. Engineered quartz isn't stone at all, but quartz chips bound in resin: it isn't bothered by acids, but doesn't like heat or direct sunlight — the resin darkens and yellows. For a kitchen tucked away inside an apartment, it's the best compromise; for an island next to a panoramic window, it isn't.
• The edge profile. Straight, chamfered, or thickened — this determines both the perceived thickness of the slab and the price.
• Joins. Where they will run, and how they will be matched to the pattern. A join at the corner of an island is visible every day.
• Cut-outs. For the sink, the hob, sockets — their positions are fixed before cutting.

How the worktop, sink and appliances line up with one another is the job of the kitchen design.

• Sealing. What to seal it with and how often, who does it, and what happens if it's skipped.

What most often goes wrong

Stone was chosen from a photo. The slab arrives, the pattern isn't right, and it's too late to change.

No reserve was set aside. Cutting used up more than calculated, and buying more from the same block isn't possible.

Backlighting was thought up after the finishing work. The wall is assembled, there's no gap, and the detail can't be built.

Marble was installed in a wet area. A year later there are stains, and a year after that, the question of replacement.

Joins weren't planned. The pattern was on the elevation drawing, but on site the slabs were joined however they happened to fit.

All five mistakes cost money at the procurement stage and cost almost nothing at the design stage. For more on how the construction budget works and why furnishing is underestimated, see the article ‘How much does an apartment renovation cost’.

What this looks like in our projects

In an apartment in a boutique residential building, an onyx wall in the bathroom is backlit from behind — exactly the detail that gets planned in the documentation.

In a country house, a stone splashback with golden veining runs the full height of the kitchen wall: the one surface in the house allowed to be loud.

In the common areas of a residential building, large-format marble-look porcelain stoneware does the job where natural stone couldn't withstand the foot traffic.

Where to start

If stone is already on your mind but it's unclear where it belongs, a walkthrough of the property answers that faster than any collection of examples. At a consultation, within an hour it becomes clear which surfaces can carry natural stone, where porcelain stoneware is the more honest choice, and what fits within the budget.

The stone is then fixed in the interior design project — together with the layout, the joins and the backlighting details, that is, before the slab gets cut.