Australian light is strong and it moves around. It comes in low and long through winter then drops almost straight down in summer. Anyone who has painted a wall with a colour that looked good on the swatch and wrong once it was up, already knows what light can do to a decision.

Natural stone reacts to it more than most surfaces do and that is worth knowing before you choose any stone. The piece you are holding under shop lights is not the piece you end up living with.

The same floor looks different at seven in the morning and two in the afternoon

Early light comes in sideways and skims across a surface instead of hitting it flat. Texture shows up. A floor that looked fairly plain in the middle of the day has a lot more going on at seven in the morning. Pale natural stone picks up whatever light is around and throws some of it back, so a room can feel awake before the sun is properly over the fence. Darker stone soaks it up and keeps a room quieter. Which one suits comes down to the room rather than the material.

Summer sun flattens everything it lands on

Summer sun overhead is harsher. It flattens colour and any room with a lot of glass gets bright enough to squint in. Warm tones usually sit better in that light than stark white which can look brilliant in a photograph and cold in real life at two in the afternoon. If you are looking at Marble tiles at Sydney showrooms, they have the display where the light is coming from while you look. Showroom lighting is flattering by design and it rarely matches a house.

A shaded room asks for something different again

Rooms with less sun have the opposite trouble. Cool grey in a shaded room can go dull and no amount of good furniture rescues it.

Outside, the same stone lifts a shade lighter

Outdoors is a different story altogether. There is no ceiling bouncing light around and no walls holding it in, so the same natural stone usually reads lighter out in the open than it does indoors. People get caught by this. They choose something for a courtyard based on how it looked inside a building then find it lifts a shade once it is laid.

Outdoor Travertine pavers show that clearly. The creams and soft browns look richer under a roof and open up in daylight especially near water where light comes back up off the surface as well as down from the sky.

Cloud and rain change the reading completely

Sydney gets its share of grey days too. Warm tones hold their colour reasonably well under cloud. Cool greys tend to go flatter. If you only ever look at samples on a clear day you are seeing half the story, so leave them somewhere you will walk past and catch them in the rain.

Wet stone is worth a look on purpose. Anything outdoors spends a fair bit of its life wet, and water deepens the colour. Tip a glass over a sample and see what you think of it. 

Shade sits in a different spot by April

Shade moves as well, which people forget. A courtyard sitting in full sun in December might spend half of April under next door's tree. Pergolas throw stripes across a surface. Glass fences bounce light into places you were not expecting. None of that is a problem, but it does mean standing in the space at a few different times before you commit. Have a look at breakfast. Have another look after work.

Your own light bulbs matter as much as the sun

Evenings change it once more. Warm globes push natural stone golden. Cooler LEDs strip that warmth out and can turn something beige a bit grey. If you spend most of your evenings in a room, look at samples under your own lights rather than someone else's.

The short version is that natural stone is not a flat colour off a chart. It shifts hour to hour and season to season and living with it is closer to living with a view than living with a paint tin. Some days it glows. Other days it sits quiet. That is the reason plenty of people keep choosing it over materials that look identical at every hour of the day.

So take a sample and leave it where the real thing is going. Look at it wet, look at it under cloud, look at it at night. A week of watching is not much against how long you will be looking at it afterwards.