Travertine flooring is highly durable and lends natural beauty to a home. It is one of the few types of flooring that works as well for interiors as it does for exteriors.

Like most natural stone, travertine works best when professionally installed, as it is heavy (a 12″ x 12″ sheet of travertine mosaic can weigh as much as 5 lbs.) and thick (tiles are 0.5″ thick and pavers are 1.25″).

Travertine Is Porous
One central fact of travertine is its porosity.

The pocked surface gives travertine its distinctive natural, chaotic texture. It also represents added maintenance issues that are not found with man-made flooring (laminate, luxury vinyl flooring, etc.) and even some forms of natural stone.

Travertine is a sedimentary rock. As opposed to igneous rock, which is formed within the earth from magma and is extremely hard, sedimentary rock is formed by the settlement of minerals and organic matter closer to the earth’s surface.

What this means in terms of flooring is that travertine is softer than igneous rock and is laced with holes and pockets created by bubbling carbon dioxide. This is what makes travertine so porous.

To mitigate this, travertine’s holes are filled in the factory with resins that blend with the surface and are difficult to detect.

Travertine Is Low- to Mid-Range Durable, Compared to Other Stones
Travertine’s porosity does not translate to a lack of durability, though.

Moh’s Scale of Hardness is a crude but basically effective method of gauging natural stone’s resistance to abrasion (but not to fracturing). On Moh’s scale, calcite (travertine is classed as a calcite) receives a 3 rating on a scale of 1 to 10.

Lowest on the scale are soft minerals like talc and gypsum.

Highest are the incredibly hard gems like diamond, topaz, and quartz.

Travertine ranks lower than marble in terms of hardness. But still, travertine is a stone, and stone will always be more durable than most interior floor coverings like engineered wood, laminate, vinyl, and ceramic or porcelain.

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