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Where Artistry Begins
Travertino is lime plaster worked to read as cut travertine: open pores, a faint horizontal bedding and a matte, honed face. It is the one finish in this family where texture does the work and sheen is almost beside the point. We supply it tinted to your colour from our Birmingham studio, ship it tracked, and lay it ourselves across the UK.
Travertine is a stone laid down in layers around mineral springs, and the reason anyone recognises it is the holes: small voids left as the stone formed, running in bands along the bedding. Travertino plaster copies both. The pitting is made deliberately in the wet material, and the banding comes from working the trowel horizontally so the passes line up rather than wander about. Underneath it is still lime and marble, so it sets as hard as anything else in the range, but the surface it presents is open and rough where a polished wall is tight and closed. Nobody has ever mistaken it for paint.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 raking light more than dark ones, because there is less contrast to help them.
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.
Travertino 24kg
The travertine stone look in real lime, tinted to your colour before it ships.£49.00
Primer Normal
Primer so the first coat keys and the wall drinks evenly across it.£10.00
Sealer
Sealer for open pores on a wall that will meet hands or splashes.£25.00
Bee's Wax Natural
Natural bees wax if you want warmth and depth rather than a sealed surface.£19.00
Sample Board
One board, laid at the pitting level you choose, to judge in daylight.£8.00Every tub is machine-tinted to your colour before it ships. Not sure of the colour? The colour library holds forty-eight house tints and we match any NCS or RAL reference.
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.
Learn it, or have it done
Our Academy in Birmingham teaches these finishes at the bench, beginner through advanced. Or our own applicators install across the UK from the same materials.
See the workNo, and we would not want you to think so. It is lime plaster worked to read as travertine, with the pores and the bedding put in by hand. The advantage is that it weighs almost nothing, needs no fixings or substructure, goes round curves and columns, and comes off a wall with no joint in it anywhere unless you ask for one.
On the walls, yes, sealed. It works well round a basin or on a cloakroom wall, and there is no grout for mould to sit in. Inside the shower enclosure we would use tadelakt instead, because the open texture and constant running water are a poor match. We will say which we would use once we have seen the room.
In a normally used and ventilated room, not really, and a soft brush or a vacuum brush head clears anything that settles. In a room with poor airflow, or anywhere near cooking, the pores will hold what lands in them. That is the case for sealing the wall, which closes the surface while leaving the texture you paid for intact.
That is one of the places it makes most sense. It is trowelled on rather than cut from a slab, so a curve needs no mitres, no jointing and no template. Columns, arched reveals and rounded returns all take it in one continuous surface. We just need to see the shape first, because the pitting pattern has to be set out to suit it.
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.
Authentic Venetian plaster, machine-tinted to your colour and made for each order. Materials, installation and master-led training, since 2021.
One list, run by the people who make the material. No noise, and nothing we would not want to read ourselves.
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