Marble Look Porcelain Tile

What comes with the field tile

Moldings are the second largest product type here, ahead of mosaics, with bases and accent pieces behind them. Bullnose, pencil, base and the narrow 3x24 and 3x18 strips all exist printed to match a field tile.

That is the part a quarried marble cannot easily answer. Cutting and polishing a bullnose from a block is slow work in a specific stone, so a real marble range covers a handful of sizes and the edges get solved with a metal profile. A printed range makes the trim on the same line as the tile. Porcelain moldings carries it across every effect.

Why this is porcelain and not ceramic

A ceramic marble look and a porcelain one can be indistinguishable on a wall, and they are not the same product. A ceramic body is porous and its decoration sits under a glaze, which makes it a wall tile.

A porcelain body is fired until it vitrifies and takes up almost no water, so the same printed face works on a floor, in a shower, in a laundry and outside. The print is the same argument in both; the body decides where the argument is allowed.

Marble look mosaics and the shower

A substantial mosaic group runs through this range, including 2x2 sheets, and it exists mainly for one surface. A shower pan is dished: it slopes to its drain from every side, so no part of it is a flat plane. A mesh sheet bends into that dish; a single rigid piece has to be cut apart before it can follow it.

Because the sheets carry the same print as the walls, the whole enclosure stays in one marble with only a change of scale at the curb. Porcelain shower tile is the enclosure and porcelain mosaics the sheets.

The 20 mm outdoor pieces

A 20 mm group sits at the thick end of this range, which is paving rather than tile: each piece is set on a prepared bed or on supports and carries its own load.

That puts a marble face on a terrace, which is the one place the look rarely goes in quarried form at any scale. Porcelain pavers is the outdoor range and Frontier20 porcelain one of the lines in it.

Pool coping in two materials

Pool copings appear here in the printed face, and they also exist in real stone, which makes this one of the few decisions where the same piece can be had both ways.

The stone gives depth and the weight of the real thing; the printed one gives a vitrified body and exact repetition from piece to piece. Marble pool coping is the quarried version, and the edge assembly itself belongs to pool and spa paving.

The base piece and where the floor stops

Bases sit in this range too, which is the piece that runs along the bottom of a wall where the floor meets it. In most rooms that job goes to a painted wood baseboard, so the floor stops at the wall and a different material takes over from there.

A tiled base makes no such handover. The marble face turns up the wall four or five inches and the room reads as one continuous surface, which is the detail that separates a bathroom that looks finished from one that looks tiled. It matters most in a wet room, where a baseboard in any other material is the wrong thing to have at floor level.

Comparing the print against the stone

The color names on this page are quarry names: Statuario, Calacatta Gold, an extra white Michelangelo and the Carrara ranges. Naming a real stone invites the comparison, which is unusual and worth using.

A sample of the print and a sample of the marble it is copying, held together in the light of the actual room, answers in a minute what a photograph cannot answer at all. Marble tile is the quarried range for exactly that.

Where a marble look porcelain goes

A bathroom floor and its shower, a kitchen, a hall, an open plan floor, a laundry, a terrace and a pool surround. The span is the point: it covers rooms that a single quarried stone would have to be specified separately for at each one.

For the effect across every material, marble look tile is the full range, and porcelain tile the body across every effect.