Under the cabinets or up to them
Tiling the whole room before the cabinets go in means the floor is continuous and the kitchen can be changed later without a patch. Tiling up to the cabinet line uses less material and leaves the cabinets sitting on the subfloor.
The second choice has a consequence at the appliances. A dishwasher and a range slide into openings measured from the finished floor, and where the tile stops short, the appliance opening is taller by the thickness of the tile. Neither approach is wrong and the quantity differs by the footprint of every run of cabinets.
What a kitchen floor is actually asked to do
Water and oil arrive without warning, things get dropped from counter height onto it, grit walks in from outside, and somebody stands on it for an hour at a time.
No other room combines those four. A bathroom gets the water without the dropped pans; a hall gets the grit without the standing. It is why a kitchen floor is specified more carefully than almost any other surface in a house.
Hardness underfoot, and the honest trade
A fired or quarried floor is the hardest surface commonly laid in a house, and a kitchen is the room people stand in longest. Those two facts sit together and it is better to know it beforehand.
What a hard floor gives back is everything else: it takes spills, heat, grit and dropped weight without argument, and it outlasts the kitchen standing on it. Where the standing matters more than the wear, luxury vinyl plank is the softer floor that still handles a kitchen.
The joint collects what the floor does not
A kitchen floor gathers grit from outside and the grit ends up in the joints, which sit slightly below the face of the tile and run in continuous lines across the room.
That is the argument for a larger format in a kitchen: fewer joints means less line for anything to collect in. It is also the argument for a mid-tone joint rather than a pale one, since a joint chosen to disappear against a pale tile is the one that shows every change.
12x12 leads here, and that is unusual
12x12 is the largest size group on this page by some distance, ahead of 12x24, 24x24 and 18x18, with 36 and 48 inch rounds among the larger pieces.
On most floor pages 12x24 leads. It goes the other way here because so much of this range is mosaic sheet and medallion, both of which come at 12x12 or in round sizes, and because a kitchen floor is frequently broken up by cabinet runs into areas a small format suits.
Medallions and the floor as a feature
Medallions make up a large group here, in 36 and 48 inch rounds and square formats.
In a kitchen a medallion goes in one of two places: centered in front of the range, where it marks the working position, or in a breakfast area where the floor opens out. Both are the traditional placements and both need the field tile chosen around them. Medallions covers how they are assembled and sized.
The materials on this page
Porcelain is the largest material, with marble, limestone, travertine, pebble and terracotta behind it, on matte, multi finish, polished and honed faces.
Matte leads the finishes and a kitchen is the room where that matters most, since a polished floor in a room with a window over a sink returns the light straight back into the eye. Porcelain floor tile and marble tile are the two largest material ranges.
Heat, and the floor under a range
A kitchen is the one room in a house with a heat source standing directly on the floor, and a fired or quarried tile is indifferent to it in a way no other flooring material is.
That is one of the oldest reasons kitchens were tiled and it still holds: a dropped hot pan leaves nothing on a porcelain or a stone floor. It is also why underfloor heating and tile go together so readily in a kitchen, since a fired body conducts heat well and has no moisture of its own to lose.
Where the kitchen floor stops
Almost every kitchen opens into something else, and the join lands in a doorway with nothing to hide it.
The thickness of both floors is what decides whether that join is level, and it is easier to establish before either floor is ordered. Floor tile takes the same decision through the rest of the house.
