Alabaster: the wall that glows

Working with translucent stone

Alabaster is soft compared with granite, which makes it workable by hand and vulnerable to acid and abrasion. In a wet room it belongs on walls, in niches and on benches, sealed correctly and kept away from descalers.

Thickness decides the glow: too thick and it stays opaque, too thin and it looks cheap and shows the fixings. We sample the actual block against the actual light before anything is cut to size, because no two blocks behave the same.

Limestone and granite, and what each is for

Egyptian limestone is the everyday material: warm, pale, easy to work, correct in almost any room here. Honed rather than polished on floors, because polished stone plus water plus bare feet is how people fall over.

Aswan granite is the opposite — dense, dark, almost indestructible, and the right answer for a plunge surround or a threshold that will take a beating for thirty years.

Cost, honestly

An alabaster niche or bench sits in our 95 to 290 thousand pound band; a basin or a full wall runs to 600. Most of that is hand labour and wastage, because translucent stone is selected piece by piece and a lot of a block does not make the grade.

If the budget is tight, one backlit niche beats a whole wall of thin panels. The same argument applies to any hand-made tile: a small area of the real thing wins.

In short

• Thickness sampled against the actual light before cutting — no two blocks glow alike
• Alabaster on walls and niches, never as a floor and never near acid
• Limestone honed for floors; Aswan granite where something must survive decades
• One backlit niche beats a whole wall of thin panels