How to choose bathroom tiles

How to choose tiles for a modern bathroom? Traditionally, in "wet areas", where moisture-proof properties were in demand - in the bathroom and in the kitchen, tiles were used. Over time, materials with stone chips, solid stone and glass, with a textured surface, rich colors and complex shapes, appeared and gained popularity, without which a modern interior is unthinkable.

The emergence of new types of tiles is caused both by the development of popular trends in apartment design and the creative imagination of designers who choose a practical and expressive bathroom finish in a modern and classic style.

How to choose tiles, given that there is a tendency to bring the interior of the bath closer to the living room, to veneer exclusively wet areas, to use non-traditional types of ceramics to imitate other finishing materials?

Unique properties

What is ceramic finish valued for:

1. Durability: high resistance to abrasion, impact, deformation, exposure to high temperatures and chemicals and ultraviolet radiation, moisture resistance.
2. Hygiene: Easy to clean, can be used with aseptic formulations and aggressive cleaning agents.
3. Excellent aesthetic characteristics: a variety of shapes, patterns, textures.

Modern assortment

Manufacturers are constantly improving production technology, using new materials and decoration methods for this area, thanks to which they surprise with an assortment, delight with interesting offers to create an exclusive interior.

Tiles are widely used in modern design:

1. ceramic;
2. faience;
3. from natural stone - granite, marble;
4. glass.

Laying methods

In addition to the classic square tiles for the bath, you can choose rectangular, hexagonal (like honeycombs), fragments of complex configuration, and mosaics.

Easy styling

Squares or rectangles are aligned parallel to the walls. This most economical installation method is chosen to minimize waste, which is important both for budget bathroom renovations and for expensive interiors where exclusive products are used.

Diagonally

A great option for the arrangement of squares is diagonal laying: spectacular, expanding the room, concealing floor irregularities or wall protrusions. The laying technology itself is more complicated and the material consumption is greater. A particularly interesting solution is to lay a border around it along the walls. On the floor, the effect of a carpet is created, on the wall - a tapestry or a picture in a frame, this will decorate the bathroom.

Brickwork

It is widely used for rectangular tiles, and is chosen not only where imitation of masonry is required near the bath, but also as a more comfortable option, a good alternative to simple installation.

On the walls, this method evokes associations with a rustic or industrial interior style, on the floor it looks very solid, “under the stone”.

Herringbone

A warm parquet pattern on the bath floor is the choice for wood-grained ceramics, but it also makes any rectangular tile floor look cute and informal.

Mosaic

A small mosaic of plain or multi-colored squares is used for facing curved surfaces, laying out fragments according to a pattern. Often it fits in a simple way, along the contour of the element, focusing attention on it.

Bathroom trends: European comfort and oriental flavor

In a modern bathroom, designers advise to avoid associations with a bathroom. They recommend even here to create a residential, cozy interior. This rejects the usual recommendations about using floor-to-ceiling tiles - not everyone feels comfortable in such an echoing stone bag.

What bathroom interior artists offer: limit yourself to tiles only in wet areas, and for the rest of the walls choose moisture-resistant wallpaper or paint them, paint them with acrylic paints, boldly decorate panels and textiles. The floor in the bathroom is tiled, but imitating other materials - mainly wood. Everything is aimed at forgetting about the "wet zone" and creating a residential, civilized, avant-garde or boudoir interior.

Interest in oriental traditions contributes to the popularity of mosaics, preference is given to glass, as the most moisture resistant and decorative. It is produced in the form of a matrix with fragments of 10X10, 20X20, 50X50 mm. The popularity of small mosaic tiles in the interior of the bath is due not only to showiness, but also to purely practical considerations: it can be chosen on walls with curvature and irregularities. Thus, a magnificent decor costs a little less - due to savings in surface preparation. By the way, not only walls, but also the floor, and even the ceiling can be laid out with mosaics - this luxury is quite acceptable for the oriental, Turkish style.

A solid stone or ceramic mosaic of restrained colors occupies its own niche. This small tile harmoniously complements the Mediterranean or antique bathroom interior, as if it carries the coolness and heat of the coast.

Another "oriental" trend is a small intricate ornament, repetitive fantasy motifs or "patchwork" design.

How to choose bathroom tiles?

Let's say right away that the choice of the type of bathroom tile, the way it is laid, the color scheme, the nature of the pattern depends much more on the style of the interior than on the purpose of the room. However, the design of a modern bathroom has some peculiarities: it is a wet zone, but, following the latest postulates of design art, it should be turned into a beautifully decorated room.

So how do you choose bathroom tiles to "get in style"? Provence, loft, oriental or high-tech dictate a certain type of ceramic coating, installation method.

How to develop a trendy project for a room with a bathroom, which tile to choose and how to use it?

To begin with, let's consider what is best suited for facing the wettest areas - the floor, the screen and the wall near the bathtub, where tiling is indispensable. For them, you can choose the usual tile, but, having got acquainted with interesting ideas of fashionable design, you will take a fresh look at how the room where you take a bath should look like.

Then we will determine how to arrange the rest of the space, choosing innovative materials: they imitate textures unusual for a bath so well that they can be safely used in the interior without fear of turning this room into a cold bathroom, tiled from top to bottom.

How to choose tiles for a spectacular floor

Ceramic or stone on the floor is the most moisture resistant, durable and hygienic coating. How to choose tiles to make the bathroom interior modern and stylish?

Under the tree

For a classic bathroom with an emphasis on a romantic, palatial or austere classic style, tiles with a wood texture are laid out in herringbone, parquet, while floorboards are chosen for a rustic and eco-style.

Visually, such a floor does not differ from a wooden one, and if heating is provided, it will be cozy to the touch.

Ceramic wood flooring can be recommended for styles: classic, country, safari, oriental Japanese, boho, Mediterranean, Scandinavian minimalism, modern modern.

White gloss

The floor in the bathroom of the "palace" style - rococo, baroque, art deco - will most clearly emphasize their romantic sublimity if you choose white glossy or marble tiles for it. The front octagonal white tiles, laid with inserts of small squares in black or gold, are the embodiment of our ideas about how the floor should be in the palace.

The freshness, cleanliness, airiness of the white floor is especially pronounced when the square tiles are placed diagonally.

honeycombs

A floor laid around the bathtub with hexagonal tiles, and rather small ones, is the choice of those who are very well versed in how to create a trendy interior. A pleasant ornament, similar to a honeycomb, did not fall into the field of view of designers for a long time and is now winning hearts with the geometric harmony of lines.

Mosaic

The mosaic floor is definitely in trend. How to choose tiles for it depending on the style of the bathroom? Antique and Mediterranean style dictate gray stone or pebble mosaics. Natural stone is ideal in this case, but as an economical and simple option, you can choose tiles that imitate antique mosaics.

The interior, designed in the traditions of North Africa, will sparkle with colors if you choose small tiles with Moroccan ornaments for the floor around the bath, from which you create a patchwork mosaic - unsystematic and picturesque.

The Turkish style involves elaborate mosaic ornaments framed by wide rectangular fields. Natural materials or ceramic tiles are chosen for such a stone carpet, this bath floor needs to be heated to maintain associations with a Turkish bath.

Mosaic based on Indian motifs stands out with a bright palette, an imitation of hand-painted. The atmosphere of serene joy and happiness fills such an interior, in which mosaic motifs smoothly flow from the floor to the walls.

A rock

The loft-style bathroom is a parade of contrasts. Exposed drainpipes and a luxurious Empire-style bathtub are set off by a cold "cement" floor. Usually, matte tiles are chosen for it, both natural and ceramic, imitating brick or stone, above which a large enameled bathtub on figured brass legs effectively rises.

Styling the interior as a loft allows you to choose white tiles, even glossy ones, and although the bathtub looks a bit glamorous on such a floor, how can you resist the temptation to create an island of radiant purity in a gloomy extravagant loft?

bath screen

As a rule, ceramic tiles are chosen for facing the bathtub: it is believed that it has no equal in ease of care and maintenance of cleanliness.

A screen is far from always needed - in interiors associated with historical styles - empire, art deco, loft, provence, boho, country - an antique-styled bath becomes one of the main decorations of the home. Which does not prevent, for practical reasons, from embedding it in niches and covering it with a tiled screen.

The bath cladding either becomes an “extension” of the floor, or, more often, echoes the wall tiles.

If the design of the screen echoes the floor tiles, then these are most likely the styles of the ecological direction: country, Japanese minimalism, chalets - where they choose wood-like bath cladding to evoke associations with rural life.

In modern avant-garde interiors, it is often with the help of the screen that the attention is focused on the bath. Then, for her, a tile is chosen either in a rich contrasting color, or monochrome, but distinguished by a rich texture, three-dimensional pattern, and a complex configuration.

The ubiquitous brickwork, or rather tile that mimics it - from radiant white to red and ultramarine - remains a favorite trend. This is not surprising if you remember in which interiors it looks exceptionally harmonious: Provence, loft, pop art, art deco, country, etc.

Volumetric “carved” drawings on monochrome tiles and intricate outlines emphasized by relief ornaments are organic in Art Deco and stylization under East style.

How to choose tiles for a rounded bath screen? The answer suggests itself - of course, a mosaic. A small mosaic can not even be laid out according to the drawing: the simplest mosaic lining looks luxurious.

Expressive, unusually picturesque innovative tile materials that give an incredible decorative effect:

glass tiles, including those with three-dimensional objects fused into glass - leaves, flowers, twigs (eco style and minimalism)

• ceramic tiles with gilding or sputtering of other precious metals (for a bohemian bathroom),
• imitating steel sheets (for loft and hi-tech),
• reptile skin imitation (safari),
• textile imitation (classic),
• mosaic panels (oriental, antique, Mediterranean style).

How to choose wall tiles

Modern designers believe that it is necessary to take a bath in a room that is not fundamentally different from others - it should be just as cozy and filled with decorative elements, but tiles are necessary in it - how to choose it?

First you need to determine how large the surfaces in the bath will be tiled.

To the ceiling, ceramics are laid only in the shower area, although to maintain the unity of the design, the “ceiling” level can be chosen for the entire bath. The undisputed favorite today is the white "brickwork". The imitation of brickwork with very small tiles, almost a mosaic, looks interesting. A combination of large and small monochrome tiles is welcome.

It is very common to decorate the walls with monochrome or three-dimensional tiles at the level of the panels, with the painting of the upper part of the wall.

If a small wall space near the bathtub is allocated for moisture-resistant cladding, this allows you to choose more expensive options, such as natural marble, glass, gilded ceramics or tiles trimmed with rhinestones.

Just limiting the area for tiling takes bath design to a new level. Innovative materials are incredibly colorful, they are not associated specifically with the bathroom - all that remains is to choose the finish of the walls, free from tiles, and you can decorate them the way you are used to doing it in other rooms - with paintings, panels, textiles or ... tiles that imitate this decor.

Don't miss the news

Designers willingly choose new types of tiles for interior design: they are so unusual and decorative that they inspire the creation of an exclusive bathroom finish. I would like to once again focus on the most spectacular.

The texture of expensive leather or skins

Decorating a bathtub screen or part of the wall with reptile skin or exotic animal skin tiles is a great choice for a luxurious safari-style interior.

Decorative panel - finished and to order

Modern technologies make it possible to apply drawings and photographs to stone and ceramics. Along with spectacular ready-made panels, you can choose to print on the tiles the graphics that best match the idea of ​​the decorator who decorates the bathroom interior - from flowers and nautical motifs to artistic photography,

Volumetric tiles

Choose voluminous embossed tiles for the bathroom interior, as they are incredibly expressive and elegant.

It decorates large surfaces, but can be used as individual medallions against a flat wall.

Designers are willing to experiment with such a rich texture. It is believed that three-dimensional tiles should not be chosen for a bath, since it is more difficult to maintain cleanliness with it, but this does not stop either customers or artists: they decorate walls with it, achieving expressiveness and interesting optical effects.

Glass with a surprise

A rare novelty is a transparent glass tile in which petals, leaves or other original inserts are fused. Such an exclusive offer is still looking for the most advantageous solutions in the bathroom interior.

This finish will decorate a fragment of the wall in the bathroom, a screen or a partition. It is believed that well-chosen lighting enhances the 3D effect of this decor.

Glamor: gold and rhinestones

Especially for those who love the atmosphere of luxury, interiors in the style of boho and art deco, a tile imitating precious metals has been developed. Gilded or coated with platinum, or imitating inclusions of gold leaf, it is used as a panel, mosaic, for decorating small wall fragments - and never goes unnoticed. Glamorous tiles with Swarovski crystals are easy to imagine in the interior of the bathroom, decorated in the spirit of the ladies' boudoir.

Conclusion

The general trends in bathroom interior design are to choose the style inherent in the living room, and to make tiles a full-fledged finishing material that combines both exceptional practicality and bright decorativeness.

Photo gallery - how to choose a bathroom tile:

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