Small formats reward close looking
6x6 leads this range by a wide margin, then 3x6, 4x8, 4x12, 3x12, 2x6 and 3x9. Every one of those is a small piece.
A large format gives a calm, quiet wall, which is what a domestic room usually wants. A room where people sit facing a wall for an hour wants the opposite: a surface with enough happening in it to hold attention on the tenth look as well as the first, and a small tile delivers that through sheer repetition and joint.
Glossy, glazed and crackled
Glossy is the face on most of it, with matte, glazed, polished and a crackled group behind it.
Gloss does two things in a hospitality room. It bounces the light around, which matters where the lighting is deliberately low, and it changes as somebody moves past it, so a wall is never quite the same from two tables. A crackled glaze goes further again, catching the color at several depths across one tile.
The colors are stronger than a domestic range
White leads, then blue, gray and green in close company, with black, beige, multicolor and brown behind them.
Blue and green sitting that high is the giveaway. In a house those are decisions people agonize over; in a cafe they are the point, because a room that has to be memorable cannot be built out of neutrals. Green backsplash tile and blue tile and mosaic carry the colors across the catalog.
The wall behind the counter
Almost every cafe has one wall that does more work than the rest: the one behind the counter, the espresso machine or the bar.
It is in every photograph the business takes, it is what people look at while they wait, and it is the surface that gets cleaned most. That combination is why so many hospitality rooms spend their tile budget on one wall and keep the rest plain.
The effects that turn up here
Colore look leads the small effect group on this page, then marble, zellige, stone and wood looks, which is a different order from any domestic range.
Colore look is a flat saturated color with depth built into the glaze rather than a print of a material, and it makes sense here for the same reason the strong colors do: a hospitality room is allowed to be a color. A zellige look sits alongside it because a handmade face gives a wall something to look at from a table.
Series names and buying twice
The series list on this page runs to more than eighty names across two hundred products, which is an unusually wide spread.
That matters for a business more than for a household. A cafe that opens a second site frequently wants the same wall, and a catalog made up of many short series is one where a given tile may or may not still be in production three years later. Recording the exact series and color at the time of the first order is worth more than it sounds, and so is keeping a spare box.
Thickness, and replacing a tile later
Nearly every piece here is 3/8 inch, with a group of thinner pieces at a quarter inch and under.
Thickness matters more in a commercial room than a domestic one for an unglamorous reason: tiles get broken. A chair goes into a wall, a trolley catches a corner, and a single replacement has to sit flush with what is around it. Knowing the figure and keeping a few spare pieces from the original order is the practical answer.
What the specification has to come from
A commercial project usually has requirements a domestic one does not, covering wear, cleanability and slip on floors.
None of those figures is published in this catalog. They come from the manufacturer's technical data for the specific product, and on a commercial job they are worth collecting before a tile is chosen rather than after.
Where this range sits
A cafe, a restaurant, a bar, a bakery, a hotel breakfast room, a counter front and any wall a business wants photographed.
Backsplash tile is the same wall in a domestic setting and ceramic tile the material most of this range is made from.
