What a bathroom asks of a tile
A bathroom wall gets interrupted more often than a wall anywhere else in a house. A vanity, a mirror, a window return, a toilet tank, a niche, a curb and a door casing all land on walls that are short to begin with.
That is why this range runs small. 6x6, 4x12, 3x6, 3x12 and 4x8 carry it, and a small piece follows an outline like that with less cutting, then lands a course where somebody wants it instead of where the tile decides. The ceramic tile page covers what the material is.
A bathroom is also the room where tiling stops most often. A band ends at a height, a reveal turns a corner, a shower wall finishes in the open air. A series that made a piece for each of those endings answers them all; one that made only the field leaves them open.
The colors a bathroom carries
White leads, then blue, gray and green, with beige and black behind them and a yellow group after that. The blues and the greens here are glazes, which is why a bathroom carries colors the floor pages never show.
The reason they get chosen here is arithmetic more than taste. The walls are small, and nothing in the room has to agree with a floor running through three others. A color that would otherwise have to be lived with everywhere only has to be lived with here.
Gloss, and the wall behind it
Around two thirds of this range is glossy, and the room is the reason. A bathroom is frequently the smallest and least daylit space in a house, and a reflective wall gives it light without a fixture in it.
What it costs is flatness. A reflection follows every undulation in the wall behind it, so a gloss tells the truth about an old wall and a matte keeps it to itself. That is the calculation worth making before the finish is settled, and it is a bathroom calculation because the viewer is standing close enough to see the result.
Mosaic, the shower floor and the niche
Nearly a third of this range is mosaic, and that share follows the two surfaces in a bathroom that are not flat. A shower floor falls toward a drain, and a niche has a back and two returns.
A mesh sheet sits down onto a surface that changes direction and a field tile cannot. The mosaic bathroom floor page covers the same job in the other materials.
Whether a series made the trim as well
A bathroom needs more pieces out of one glaze than any other room does. A single room can want a field tile, a mosaic for the shower floor, a pencil or a chair rail to close the top of a band, and a bullnose for the window reveal, all in the same color. Ceramic series are narrow, as the ceramic tile page sets out.
Where a series made all of those, the room stays in one color from the pan to the reveal. Where it made only the field, three pieces have to come from somewhere else, and two glazes a shade apart are harder to live with in a small room than a contrast chosen on purpose.
The window reveal and the door casing
A bathroom is the one room where the thickness of a tile becomes visible, and the place it shows is a window reveal. Tiling carried into a reveal takes depth off the opening on both sides, and on a window that was small to begin with, that is a change somebody notices.
The same happens at a door casing and at the end wall of a vanity. None of the three can be adjusted afterwards, which puts them among the things to look at while the tile is still a decision.
Accent tiles, moldings and zellige
Accent tiles, wall decos and moldings carry real weight in a bathroom rather than sitting at the end of a catalog, and a zellige look group sits alongside them.
A bathroom is the scale that carries them. A relief tile or an irregular zellige face across a whole open plan wall becomes a great deal of surface to read; across the four feet above a vanity it is a feature. The ceramic tile page covers why a glaze can be shaped at all.
