Consider the base colour
Interior designer Stewart Horton of Horton & Co often starts with the base colour palette of the interior when choosing a white marble – he says would choose a Calacatta style if he wanted to keep it crisp, with cool tones such as greys and whites, in very contemporary homes.
“But if you have a home with a lot of timber in it you might want to mix it up,” he adds. “I think houses, where there’s a lot of timber, do lend themselves to having a touch of ivory, a touch of a beige in it, just so it holistically kind of works.”
The look of marble has always been timeless, and Horton says, that its classical beauty has given the material many uses, making it work in many different interior schemes.
“The thing is, it’s so versatile,” he says. “It’ll work for Hamptons, but then, you know, you can use it in a contemporary interior, and it’ll still work there as well.”
“It’s all a balance. So if you’ve got something that’s got a very strong veining, then you might keep everything else a little bit subdued, but it depends on the scheme. In some homes, you want everything muted and pared down. The next client might want something a bit more dramatic, so then that’s when something with a lot of deep veins would, I think, work well. In my own place, I used a crisp white with very dark grey veins. My house is very pared back with the palette, but I wanted that really deep veining as a dramatic kind of contrast.”