Stone Slab

The pattern is much larger and flatter than plain stone, so a wall of it reads as one clean surface instead of the speckled noise stone gives you from a distance. That makes it a good neutral: floors, plazas, the inside of a hallway you do not want competing with the furniture in it.

The catch is timing. The workstation behind it is not something you have in the first hours of a world, so early builds are stuck with gray brick even though the slab is cheaper to churn out once you are set up.

Treat it as a background material. If a build already has one strong surface doing the talking, slab is what you put behind it.