Hexagon Tile Backsplash

The glazed ceramic side of the shape

Ceramic is the second largest material here and most of it is glossy, which is the real difference between this page and the hexagon tile and mosaic range, where the shape arrives almost entirely in honed and polished stone.

Blush, Sage Jade, Blanc, Noir and Gris Fonce are the names to look at. On a kitchen wall the hexagon carries a color somebody mixed, where the stone version carries the one a quarry produced, and that is where the green, the pink and the yellow on this page come from.

The single tile at 5 and 8 inches

Around a third of this range is single tiles and not mesh sheets, a much larger share than the shape carries overall. The 5 inch and 8 1/4 inch pieces are the ones to notice.

The reason is the size of the surface. A run between a counter and a wall cabinet is around eighteen inches tall, so a 5 inch hexagon gives it three or four courses and reads as a pattern of distinct pieces. The same piece on a floor is swallowed by the area around it.

Elongated and midi

Two variants of the outline turn up here and rarely elsewhere. An elongated hexagon is stretched along one axis, so instead of a honeycomb it produces a long interlocking run that pulls the eye sideways along the wall.

Midi is a maker's name for the middle chip size, between the 1 inch mosaic and a full tile. On a backsplash that middle size is frequently the one that works, because a 1 inch chip turns eighteen inches of wall into a texture and a full tile turns it into three pieces.

The straight lines a backsplash sits between

A backsplash is bounded top and bottom by two dead straight lines, the counter and the underside of the cabinets. A hexagon meeting a line like that gives either alternating whole pieces and halves or a row of cut pieces, depending which way the shape runs, and the hexagon tile and mosaic page works out why.

The top line is the one that gets looked at, so the shape costs something there that it does not cost in the middle of the field. That is the single thing worth working out before the shape is chosen, and it is why a hexagon so often ends up run full height. A cabinet line sits at eye level and a ceiling line does not, so the same part row reads as a decision in one place and as an accident in the other.

The materials a backsplash can use

Glass leads, then ceramic and marble almost level with each other, with terracotta, limestone, a marble look porcelain, a travertine and a cement after them.

A backsplash asks less of a material than a floor does, since nothing is dragged over it and nothing is dropped on it, so a tile published for walls only is not ruled out here. That is why so many materials turn up on one page, and why the decision is very nearly all appearance.

Where the field ends

Three arrangements cover most of what gets built: a run between counter and cabinet, a full height wall behind a range or a sink, and a band that stops at a height somebody picked. The choice matters more with a hexagon than with a rectangle.

A square stops cleanly on a course line. A hexagon stops on a row of halves or a row of cuts, so somebody has to decide the ending instead of arriving at it. The kitchen backsplash range holds the rest of the shapes for the same wall.

Reading a hexagon listing

Two fields carry the weight. The material tells you whether the color is a glaze or a stone, and the size tells you whether a figure is the piece or the sheet.

The hexagon tile and mosaic page sets out how a hexagon size is written and why the mesh sheets have the dimensions they do. For the same wall in a rectangle, subway tile is the other half of this decision.