Pebble, and why relief suits a wet floor
Pebble mosaic is river stone, sorted by size and color and set onto mesh. It is the largest group here and the one people picture when they picture a spa floor: rounded stones, a surface with real relief in it, nothing about it flat.
What makes it a wet-area material is that relief. A foot standing on pebble is standing on dozens of separate curved surfaces with gaps between them, and water goes into the gaps instead of sitting between the sole and the floor.
The pebble colors are landscapes
The products here are called Bali Mix, Rio, Tide, Spring, Forrest and Taipei Green at one end, and Silver Quartz, Black Pearl, Charcoal and Tan at the other. The first group names places and moods; the second names what the stones look like. What no pebble product carries is a quarry name, because a river rounded these stones and there is no bed to name.
Multicolor leads the range by a distance and that is the honest description of most pebble: a single sheet holds several tones because the river did not sort them. The plain ones, Charcoal and Tan and Black Pearl, are the exception.
Three ways a pebble is finished
Natural is the untouched river surface, matte and slightly irregular. Polished pebble has been tumbled further so the stones read as glossy, which deepens the color the way a wet stone looks darker than a dry one. It goes where the pebble is looked at more than walked on.
Flat pebble is the third kind: the same stones sliced so their tops sit level with each other. It is the version for a shower somebody stands still in for ten minutes every morning.
Glass in a pool
Glass is the other material here and it is the classic pool lining. Nothing porous sits behind the surface, so water has nowhere to go into it, and that is the property the whole use rests on.
Color arrives two ways in glass and both are on this page. Some pieces are colored in the melt, so the color is the material itself and the piece glows where light passes through it. Others are clear glass with a coating or a metal leaf on the back, so light travels through the glass, bounces off the backing and returns: that is the version with the depth people associate with a pool wall. The glass tile range is where the wider palette sits.
Reading the usage before ordering
This is the important part on this page and it is easy to skip. Pool, spa step, shower floor and backsplash are four different surfaces with four different requirements, and a sheet made for one is not automatically made for another.
The usage published against each product is the field that answers it, and in this range it varies more than the page name suggests. A sheet published for a shower wall and a sheet published for a pool are not the same product even when the stones look identical.
Sheet size and coverage
Almost everything here is a foot-square sheet, with a small 12x18 group behind it. Coverage per box is the figure that turns a wall or a floor measurement into an order, and it swings widely: boxes in this range run from around five square feet up past twenty.
That swing comes from how many sheets a box holds. Most of the sheets cover a square foot and the 12x18 group covers half again as much, so the sheet count on its own tells you very little. Work from the square footage on the listing and treat the count as packing information.
Pebble beyond the pool
The same sheets turn up in a shower floor more often than in a pool, and that is where most of this material actually goes. A shower pan is a small sloped floor, which is exactly the shape a flexible mesh sheet of small pieces suits.
The shower floor tile range is the wider list for that surface, across all the materials that go into one.
Thickness and what sits under a sheet
Pebble sheets run thicker than flat mosaic because the stones themselves have depth: 3/8 inch is common here and the natural sheets vary within a single product, since a river stone is not a manufactured dimension.
The glass sheets are the thin end, closer to a quarter inch. Mixing the two in one surface is therefore a height question before it is a design one, because the two materials do not finish at the same level on their own.
