The checkerboard floor
Black and white tile means a checkerboard to almost everybody who asks for it, and the pattern is older than the tile industry. It ran through Dutch painting, Victorian hallways, Parisian kitchens and midcentury American bathrooms, which is why it reads as period and current at the same time.
The reason it survives is that it does something no single-color floor does: it gives a room a grid, and a grid gives a room a scale. A small entry with a checkerboard floor looks deliberate where the same room in a plain tile looks unfinished.
Buying two colors as one floor
This is the practical part and it is where checkerboard floors go wrong. The black and the white are two separate products, and three things have to agree between them: the size, the thickness and the finish.
Size is obvious and thickness is not. Two 12x12 tiles from different series can differ by a sixteenth of an inch, which is nothing on a wall and a ridge you can feel on a floor where every other piece is the other tile. Finish is the third: a honed white against a polished black is a decision some people make on purpose and nobody should make by accident.
The whites on this page
Carrara is the commonest, in both the Italian and the T grades, and its gray veining is what keeps a checkerboard from looking printed. Calacatta and Calacatta Gold are the bolder whites, with heavier veins that carry warmth. Thassos is the plainest of them and the closest to a true flat white.
Against a black square, a veined white behaves differently from a plain one: Carrara softens the contrast and Thassos maximizes it. That single choice changes the floor more than the black does.
The blacks, and why black is hard
There is no such thing as a uniformly black natural stone that stays uniform. Black marble carries movement and the amount varies piece to piece, which is part of what makes a stone floor a stone floor.
Absolute Black granite is the answer for anyone who wants black to mean black. It is the densest material on this page and the most consistent, and it is here in honed, polished and flamed. Brazilian Montauk slate is the third route, a dark gray-black with a natural cleft texture where the others have a sawn face.
Sizes that make a pattern
12x12 leads here and it is the traditional checkerboard square, followed by 18x18 for a larger grid and 12x24 for the rectangular patterns. Scale matters more in this range than in any other: a 12x12 checkerboard in a big kitchen reads busy, and an 18x18 in a powder room reads like four tiles.
The 4x12 subway pieces are the wall half of the same idea, for a black and white backsplash that answers the floor without repeating it.
Honed against polished
The split is close to even here and the two make genuinely different floors. Polished throws light and doubles the contrast, which is the glossy period look. Honed is matte and quieter, and it holds its appearance more evenly on a floor that gets walked.
There is also a flamed option in the granite, where the surface has been heat treated into a rough texture. That one belongs outdoors and in an entry.
Beyond the floor
The same two colors run through the rest of the catalog in formats this page does not carry. Black and white mosaic covers the sheet formats, where the pattern arrives built into the sheet.
For the materials on their own, marble tile is the whites and black tile and mosaic the other half.
Marble, granite, slate and ceramic together
Four kinds of material sit on this page and they behave differently from one another. Marble is carbonate, so an acidic spill leaves an etch on it. Granite is a silicate and does not react that way, which is why Absolute Black holds up differently from a black marble in a kitchen.
Slate splits along a cleavage the rock acquired under pressure, usually at an angle to the bed it was laid down in, so a cleft slate face is a plane the earth made and not one a saw cut. The fired options, ceramic and porcelain, are the fourth route, and ceramic is where the subway formats here sit.
