Where purple comes from in a stone
Most rock colors come from iron or carbon, which give the browns, reds, grays and blacks. Purple needs manganese, usually alongside iron, in a pale enough ground for the tint to show.
That combination is uncommon, and where it occurs it tends to appear in patches within a block rather than across a whole bed. It is why purple turns up as veining in a marble far more often than as a ground color, and why a purple stone tile is a rare thing to find at all.
A crackled glaze does it the easy way
The glazed pieces here are mostly crackled, which is a glaze fired so that its surface develops a network of fine hairline cracks.
On a purple that matters, because each crack catches the color at a slightly different depth and a single tile ends up carrying several violets. A flat purple glaze can look synthetic; a crackled one has the variation a natural material would have supplied.
Why purple needs to be broken up
Purple is the color the eye tires of fastest across a large area, which is a practical reason as much as a stylistic one.
So the pieces here are small or narrow: a 3x6, a 6x6, a 2 1/8x7 1/2 brick and a mosaic sheet, with a single 12x24. Broken into small units with joint between them the color reads as texture; as a large uninterrupted plane it reads as a statement very few rooms can absorb.
The purple that is really a marble
One piece in this small range is a Calacatta, which is a white marble, and it sits here because the veining running through it reads violet.
That is the honest situation with purple stone: the ground is pale and the color arrives in the lines. A room using it gets a white surface with violet drawn across it rather than a purple surface, which is a much quieter proposition than a purple glaze and a far easier one to live with.
The names describe depths rather than hues
The series here run to myrtle and abyssal alongside a plain purple, which are describing darkness as much as color.
That is a pattern with violets generally. A purple lightened toward pink has its own name, lavender or mauve; a purple darkened has to borrow from plants and water, because English does not carry many purple words of its own.
Where purple works
A panel behind a basin, a powder room, a band inside a neutral field, the back of an alcove and a bar. It sits with brass and dark wood and against cool grays it reads cold.
It is a color used as a decision rather than a background, which is exactly what a handful of products in small formats and no field-tile sizes would suggest. Nobody buys purple by accident, and the range reflects that. Blue tile and mosaic is the nearest neighbor in the spectrum and pink tile and mosaic the other rare warm color.
