Rock face is the largest finish here
Rock face is the leading finish, with polished, glazed, honed and a split face piece behind it.
That is unusual for a mosaic. Most sheets are flat and the choice is between degrees of shine; here the largest group is a broken, uneven front where the stone was split rather than sawn, and the surface has real relief in it.
Which is why the thickness goes to three quarters
The thickness figures run from 3/8 of an inch up to 3/4, with two listed simply as random.
Those are two different products under one heading. The thin sheets are flat brick mosaic for a floor or a backsplash. The thick and random ones are split stone: wall panels where the pieces project by different amounts and the point is the shadow between them.
Brick proportion at mosaic scale
A brick mosaic keeps the elongated proportion that makes masonry read as masonry, at a size where a single sheet carries a dozen courses.
That compresses the effect. A thin brick wall gives a room the scale of real brickwork; a brick mosaic gives it the texture of brickwork at a distance and reads as a woven surface up close. They are aiming at different things with the same shape. Thin brick is the full-size version.
The sheets are large
12 5/8x12 5/8 and 11x17 lead the sizes, with 12x14, 4x24, 12x16 and a 12x12.
The 11x17 and 4x24 pieces are the split face panels, which run larger than a flat sheet because each unit is heavier and fewer handlings is the point. A 4x24 strip is a single course of a wall rather than a patch of one.
The offset is already decided
On a loose brick or subway tile the course offset is chosen on the wall: a half, a third, a stack. On a brick mosaic it was chosen in the factory and it cannot be changed.
That is the trade the format makes. It removes the slowest part of laying a small elongated tile and it removes the decision along with it, so the thing to look at on a listing is what offset the sheet actually carries, since it is the pattern you are buying.
The stones behind it
Silver, Sahara, Paris, Carrara, Brera, Granada, Mink and a Geneve run through this range, in whites, grays, beiges and multicolors.
Those are marbles and limestones rather than clay, which is the thing to hold onto: a brick mosaic is stone in a brick shape, not a small brick. The color range is a stone range and the material behaves like stone in every respect that matters.
Where a brick mosaic goes
A backsplash, a fireplace breast, a feature wall, a shower wall in the flat versions and a band inside a plain field.
The split face pieces belong on walls only, since the relief that makes them work is what makes them wrong underfoot. Stone mosaic tile reaches the sheets cut from every quarried stone, and ledger panel the larger stacked units.
