Stone Mosaic Tiles

Marble is most of this page for a reason

Marble dominates this range by a very wide margin, ahead of travertine, limestone, slate, granite, metal and clay.

It is the stone that cuts best. A marble is dense, even-grained, the same material all the way through and soft enough to work quickly without being soft enough to crumble at an edge. Every one of those properties matters more at chip scale than it does on a floor tile, because a mosaic is almost entirely edge.

What each stone can and cannot become

A slate splits along its bedding planes, so it arrives as split-face strips and ledger units rather than as cut shapes. A travertine has open voids running through it, and every cut through one exposes a hole at the edge, which limits how small a piece can sensibly be.

A granite is hard enough that cutting it into small figures costs more than the result usually justifies, so it turns up as squares and strips. A limestone cuts cleanly but will not hold a polish, so it stays matte whatever shape it takes. Limestone mosaics and marble mosaics are the two largest material pages.

Polished leads, and it does more here

Polished carries this range, roughly twice the size of the honed group, with tumbled, multi finish, natural, textured and rock face pieces behind them.

A square foot of mosaic holds far more cut edge than a square foot of field tile, and on a polished sheet every one of those edges returns light at a slightly different angle. The result is a glitter that a polished 12x24 cannot produce, which is why polished sheets outnumber honed ones here and the ratio reverses on a field tile page.

White carries the color list

White is the largest color group by a long way, then gray, beige, black and multicolor, with blues, greens and browns behind them.

The concentration follows from the shapes. A mosaic pattern is a figure, and a figure needs a quiet ground to be read against, so the stones that get cut into hexagons, herringbones, basket weaves and arabesques are overwhelmingly the pale ones. A boldly veined dark marble in a small chip fights its own outline.

The sheet dimensions do not settle

12x12 leads, then 11x12, 11x11, 10 3/8x12 and dozens of other dimensions, and that untidiness is the shape asserting itself over the sheet.

A grid of squares adds up to a clean 12x12. A herringbone lays out as a parallelogram and has to be trimmed. A hexagon leaves a toothed edge. A waterjet figure ends wherever the design ends. The coverage figure on the listing is the number that compares between them.

Metal and clay in a stone range

Two smaller groups here are not stone at all: metal pieces and fired clay, both appearing inside otherwise stone sheets.

They are there as accents. A brushed metal strip or a handful of clay chips set among marble gives a sheet a second material to catch light differently, and because they are individual pieces within a mesh figure they can be introduced without changing the shape or the stone around them. It is the one place in tile where mixing materials is routine rather than a risk.

Thickness, and where a sheet meets a tile

Most of this range sits at 3/8 inch, with groups at 1/2, 0.39 and 0.75 inch and a handful thinner.

That figure matters wherever a mosaic band runs inside a field of something else, which is one of the commonest uses for these sheets. A 3/8 inch stone sheet set into a 9 mm porcelain floor sits about a sixteenth of an inch proud, and that difference has to be resolved underneath rather than discovered afterwards.

Where stone mosaic goes

A shower floor, a backsplash, a niche, a border inside a larger floor, a bathroom floor and a panel behind a basin. The small format handles what a large tile cannot, which is any surface with a curve, a corner or a change of plane in it.

Mosaic tile is the full range across every material, pebble mosaics the river stone sheets, and glass mosaics the other large non-stone group.