Terrific terrazzo: Why 'speckled' concrete suits so many surfaces

Home of the Year winner Jennifer Sheahan shares the reasons she loves this versatile material 

Terrazzo sink from the Holm collection by Kast Concrete Basins in London.

Neverout of interiors style, terrazzo is having one long and welcome moment. Dermot Bannon himself has terrazzo flooring in his own dream home, in muted dark tones, and therein lies the beauty of terrazzo — amongst many other attributes, it is incredibly versatile. It can be light, dark, colourful, monochrome, chunky, small-patterened, dramatic, or muted. It is hard to think of a design scheme that wouldn’t benefit from a hit of terrazzo, such is its protean nature. 

Terrazzo, if you don’t know, is what you’re looking at when you see a “speckled” concrete. It is an aggregate material, a soup of chips mixed into composite (usually concrete but sometimes epoxy resin), poured and polished to reveal unique shapes and colours. Those chips can be marble, granite, glass, pebbles, quartz, and more.