Mosaic backsplash tile
Mosaic is not one option among several in this collection. It is the majority of it, by a wider margin than on any other surface in the store, and three separate things push it there. At arm's length a small piece is legible, so the detail is not wasted. The band is short enough that a small format still lands in a sensible number of courses. And a backsplash is the smallest tiled area in a house, so the format that costs the most per foot is the one it can carry.
One caution before reading the sizes here: on a mosaic the figure in the title does not always mean what it appears to. The mosaic page sets out which number to read and why the coverage figure is the one that holds across every product.
Counter to cabinet height
Most backsplashes are a horizontal strip with a fixed top and a fixed bottom. The counter sets one edge and the underside of the wall cabinets sets the other, and conventionally that gap is somewhere around a foot and a half.
It changes what a size means. On a floor a tile is chosen for the room; here it is chosen for a band, and the question underneath every format decision is how many courses land in that band without the top one arriving as a sliver. Long narrow shapes owe their popularity to it: the 4 by 12, the 3 by 12 and the 2 by 6 course into a strip tidily, and a 12 by 24 laid the long way covers most of one on its own.
Backsplash tile materials
Say backsplash and most people think of a white ceramic subway tile. Porcelain is in fact the largest material group here by a distance, with marble second, ceramic third and glass behind those.
Porcelain got here the same way it got everywhere else, by imitating stone convincingly and asking almost nothing in return. The looks bear that out: marble, travertine, concrete, stone, slate and limestone are the six most common effects in the range, and there is very little wood look because nobody wants a wooden wall behind a cooktop.
Glass, metal and clay backsplash
Glass appears here in real numbers, and metal and clay in small ones. None of the three has much of a future on a floor, and that is exactly why a backsplash collects them.
Glass is the clearest case. It carries its color all the way through a transparent body, which no printed surface can imitate, so a glass mosaic has a depth to it that comes from the material itself. It also does more than most materials with an under cabinet light, which is the light a backsplash actually lives in.
Single panel backsplash
A group of the tile here is 24 by 48, and a piece that size behind a cooktop is a different proposition entirely. It covers the band in a single sheet, or close to it, and the grout disappears from the middle of the field.
It sets up the neatest opposition in the collection. On a mosaic the joints are most of what the eye picks up; on a single panel there are none in the middle of the field at all. Both are in demand at once, because they answer different questions about the same wall.
The section behind the cooktop
One section of a backsplash does a job the others do not. It takes heat, steam and oil that has traveled, and it is the part that gets wiped hardest and most often.
That is why so many kitchens treat it as a separate panel: a different tile, a taller section, sometimes a full sheet where the rest of the run is mosaic. A material that is perfectly happy beside the sink can have a harder time directly over a burner, and the ranges say which of their tiles are meant for it.
Backsplash tile colors
White leads and gray follows, as they do everywhere. What is different is further down: blue is level with black in this range, and the share of blue is nearly three times what it is in the floor tile range.
A backsplash is the smallest tiled area in a house. It is where a color decision costs the least to make and the least to change, which is why the blues, greens and multicolor blends concentrate on this surface and thin out everywhere else.
Marble backsplash tile
Marble is the second material here, and most of it arrives as mosaic. Small pieces of Carrara set on mesh, honed or tumbled or rock faced, are one of the oldest things in this catalog.
Mosaic is also how marble gets into a kitchen in the first place. A slab of a strongly figured stone takes over a room; the same stone cut into 5/8 inch squares reads as texture and sits behind a counter without arguing with anything. What the stone itself asks for is set out on the marble page.
The rest of the kitchen
Almost everything here also appears in the wider kitchen tiles range, which covers the floor and treats it as the harder of the two problems. This page is the other half of that room.
For the format itself, the mosaic range is the wider view across the house, and the wall tiles page covers what a wall asks for in general as against what a kitchen wall asks for.
