Brooklyn Porcelain Collection

What eight millimeters buys

A thinner body is lighter to carry, lighter to ship and it raises a floor by less.

That last point is the one that matters in a renovation. Where new tile goes over an existing floor, every millimeter comes off the door clearance and shows at the threshold into the next room. Two millimeters is not much and across a whole apartment it is the difference between trimming doors and not.

What it costs

A thinner tile asks more of the surface underneath it. A body with less depth has less resistance to bending, so a dip or a high spot in the substrate has more effect.

It is a trade rather than a compromise. Elsewhere in the catalog the interior floor default is thicker, and that thicker body is what a new floor on a fresh base normally uses; this depth turns up instead in renovation and commercial work. Porcelain floor tile holds the thicker standard.

One format, five colors

12x24 throughout, in gray, white, black, beige and brown, which is the whole of the range.

A collection built this way is answering one question. The size is the most widely used interior floor format there is, the thickness is fixed, and what is left to decide is the color. It is a range for a job that needs a decision made quickly and consistently across several rooms.

Concrete look, and the Cemento name

The series name is Cemento and the effect is concrete look across most of the range.

Concrete suits a collection like this better than any other print. It has no grain and no direction, so a piece can be laid any way round, and it hides the joint pattern better than a veined print does. On a floor covering several rooms in one material, both of those matter, and they matter more as the area grows and the number of decisions someone has to get right goes up.

Honed and R11 textured

The range splits between honed and a group whose finish field reads R11 textured.

R11 names a texture class assigned by the manufacturer rather than a figure this catalog publishes. What is worth knowing is that the two faces look close and feel different, and a specification needing a documented class takes the number from the producer's technical sheet.

The box, and what it tells you

Every product here comes eight pieces to a box covering 15.5 square feet, which is identical across the whole range.

Consistency like that is the point of a collection built this way. Ordering five colors of the same tile means five identical calculations, five identical deliveries and one waste allowance, which is exactly what a job running one floor through several rooms needs.

Where this range belongs

An apartment renovation, a commercial interior, a rental, a hallway running into several rooms and any job where one floor has to work everywhere and be decided once.

Concrete look tile carries the other ranges in the same effect, and porcelain tile the material in full.