Porcelain Mosaic Tiles

Printing at two inches

On a large tile a print has room to show a vein running across the piece. On a 2x2 chip there is no room for a vein to go anywhere.

So the print changes: instead of a figure crossing each piece, the sheet carries a range of tones distributed across many pieces, and the pattern exists at the level of the sheet rather than the chip. A stone mosaic does the same thing by accident of cutting; a porcelain one does it on purpose.

Matte carries the range

Matte takes the greater part of the range, well ahead of glossy, polished and a lappato group.

That is the reverse of a stone mosaic page, where polished leads. The reason is what these are for: a porcelain mosaic is overwhelmingly a floor and shower pan product, and a floor mosaic is matte for the same reason any floor is. The glossy pieces here are the wall ones. Stone mosaic tile is the quarried alternative.

12x12 and the 2x2 chip

12x12 leads the sheet sizes by a long way, with a large 2x2 group and 12x24, 12x10, 2x4 and a spread of others behind them.

The 2x2 is a chip size rather than a sheet size, and it is the most common single chip in a shower pan. It is small enough to follow a compound fall and large enough that a pan does not become almost entirely joint, which is the balance the format exists to strike.

The effects follow the field tile

Marble look leads, then travertine, stone, slate, concrete and limestone looks.

That order matches the field tile ranges, and it is not a coincidence: a porcelain mosaic exists mainly so a bathroom can put the same face on the pan as on the walls. The sheet is being made to match a tile rather than to be chosen on its own. Porcelain shower tile covers the enclosure.

9 mm, and what that solves

Most of this range is 9 mm with a group at 8 mm and others behind them, which is the same thickness the field tile runs at.

That is the practical advantage over a stone sheet. A 3/8 inch stone mosaic set into a 9 mm porcelain floor leaves a small step; a porcelain mosaic from the same series does not, because it was made at the same depth as the tile it is going next to.

White and gray lead the colors

White is far in front, then gray and beige, with black and the rest well behind.

A pan and a bathroom floor are the two surfaces this material mostly covers, and both get chosen to sit under the room rather than to be part of it. The colored porcelain mosaics that do exist tend to belong to a decorative series rather than to a floor range.

The odd sheet sizes

Alongside the 12x12 sit 12x10, 12x15, 2x18, 5x10, 3x3 and a 10 7/16x12 13/16, which is a wider spread of sheet dimensions than most materials show.

It follows from the shapes. A chip grid lands on a clean 12x12; anything else, a herringbone, a picket, an elongated brick, lays out to something that has to be trimmed. The coverage figure on the listing is what compares between two sheets rather than the nominal size.

Lappato on a mosaic

A short lappato group appears here as well, which is a partial polish: the face ground only at its high points so the raised areas shine and the hollows stay matte.

On a mosaic that does something a full polish cannot. A polished sheet glitters uniformly from every cut edge; a lappato one catches light in patches across the field, which reads closer to a worn stone floor than either a matte or a polished sheet does.

Where a porcelain mosaic goes

A shower pan, a bathroom floor, a niche, a border inside a larger floor and a wall where the field tile is from the same series.

It is rarely the right answer on a large open floor, where the quantity of joint that makes a mosaic work on a shaped surface becomes the dominant feature of the room. Mosaic tile reaches the sheets in other materials, and porcelain tile the same body in larger formats.