Three tiles meet at every vertex
A square grid puts four tiles at each vertex and runs two families of straight joints through the whole floor. A hexagon puts three, at 120 degrees to each other, and because no two of those edges are in line, a joint cannot continue through the vertex.
That is the entire visual argument for the shape. A hexagon field has no grid in it, so the eye takes the surface in as a texture and never starts counting rows, and a plain material gets to behave like a pattern without a pattern being printed on it.
The mesh sheet, and what it is for
Four pieces in five here arrive as mosaic sheets, and the single tiles are the small remainder. The interest in a hexagon lives in the repeat, so the face of any one piece matters less than usual, so the shape wants to be small, and at an inch across a loose piece is impractical to handle in quantity.
Mesh is the modern answer to that. The bathroom floors this shape is descended from used sheets too, but they were face mounted on paper: the paper stayed on the exposed face while the sheet went down, and it was soaked off afterwards. A mesh sheet sits behind the tile instead and stays there, which is why a mosaic sheet today is read from the front in the showroom and a period one could not be.
Reading the size on a hexagon
A hexagon has no length and width the way a rectangle does, so a single figure in the size field is the piece itself, measured across its flats. The 5 inch and 8 1/4 inch entries here are one hexagon of that width. Two figures separated by an x are the sheet, and the pieces on it are far smaller.
Chip notation is the exception, and it is inherited from square mosaic: a hexagon chip written as 1x1 means one inch across. The second figure is borrowed from the square and carries nothing. The chip measurement is what decides how the finished surface looks. A 1 inch chip reads at arm's length as a texture, a 2 inch chip reads as a pattern, and the same marble in both is two different floors.
The materials the shape comes in
Glass and marble carry most of this range, and behind them sit terracotta, ceramic, a marble look porcelain, a travertine and a cement. Bardiglio, Emperador, Chiaro, Statuario and Noce are the stone names; Hexagono and Regenerado are the terracotta.
What the shape does for a material is let it be read as a pattern. A Bardiglio hexagon is the same gray marble as a Bardiglio rectangle, working differently, because the outline is carrying some of what the stone used to carry alone.
The finishes, and where the glazed ones are
Honed is the largest finish group here, polished is close behind it, and gloss hardly appears. This page is weighted toward stone and the finishes follow.
The glazed and glossy side of the shape sits on the hexagon backsplash page, where the ceramic is. The two pages overlap in material and divide by room: the stone finishes concentrate here and the glazed ceramic concentrates there.
Why it works on a bathroom floor
A bathroom floor is the one floor in a house that is deliberately not flat. A shower pan falls toward a drain from every side, and a sheet of small pieces on mesh follows that fall where a large tile has to be cut into it.
The rest of the room gets the shape for a different reason. A bathroom floor is small, and a small floor is where a texture stays legible, which is also why the 1 inch chip stays a single-room decision.
Where a hexagon field meets a straight wall
This is the part worth understanding before the sheets arrive, and it depends entirely on which way the shape runs. With the flats horizontal, a horizontal wall takes alternating pieces. One hexagon sits its whole flat edge against the line and stays whole; its neighbor reaches half a piece past the line and comes back as a trapezoid.
With the same hexagon point up the picture changes completely. Every piece along that wall now has a point past the line, so every piece is cut, and what comes back is a pentagon where the other orientation gave a trapezoid. Neither orientation gives a wall a full run of whole tiles, and one of them gives half of them, which is a real difference on a long wall.
It is also the argument for the smaller chip. A cut through a 1 inch hexagon is not something anybody looks at, and a cut through an 8 inch one is.
Thickness, and the other shapes
The mesh sheets are the thinnest group here, with the single tiles around 3/8 inch and the terracotta and cement pieces at 3/4. A hexagon in a mesh sheet and a hexagon in a fired tile are two different depths, which matters wherever the two meet in one room.
For the same shape on a kitchen wall, the hexagon backsplash range is the kitchen half of it. The mosaic range holds every other chip shape, marble tile has the stones in their rectangular formats, and glass tile the material that leads this page.
