What the porcelain body adds
Two things, both of them a consequence of firing. A body taken to vitrification takes up almost no water, which is what puts the pattern on exterior paving and in wet rooms. And a fired tile carries its strength in the body, so the range reaches 24x24, 12x24 and 24x48 at ordinary floor thickness.
The cast cement original is on the terrazzo tile page, which sets out how terrazzo is actually made and how to tell a cast chip from a printed one.
The textured faces in the finish field
More than half the tiles here carry a face the finish field records as anti-slip, which is unusual for a decorative pattern and says something about where the product is specified: commercial floors, entries and outdoor paving. It is a finish label and not a measured figure. A documented class sits outside this catalog, in the manufacturer's own data.
A terrazzo pattern earns its place on those floors for a reason unrelated to taste. A busy scattered face shows less of the scuffing and dust that a plain floor reports, which is part of why the pattern went into public buildings in such quantity from the 1890s onward.
The 20 mm outdoor pieces
Two pieces in this range are pavers rather than tiles, and their 20 mm is doing a different job from the thickness on a cast terrazzo tile. A paver at 20 mm sits on sand, gravel or pedestals, carrying a load across the gap underneath it, and the depth is what it resists bending with.
Everything else here sits at ordinary porcelain floor thickness. The porcelain paver range covers the outdoor formats across the other faces.
The limits of a terrazzo print
A print copies the scatter, the color and the scale, and at arm's length it does that convincingly. What it cannot reproduce is the cut section through a real stone chip, and the terrazzo tile page sets out what that looks like close up.
The practical consequence is repetition. Any printed series works from a finite library of faces, so across a large floor one of them comes back around, where a cast tile has no library to draw on.
The series and the colors
Landmark Ceramics supplies the greater part of this range, with Diamond White, Oyster Beige, Fashion Grey and Precious Black among the names, alongside the neutral and multicolor mixes.
The color list runs wider than the cast range reaches, and sourcing is why. A cast terrazzo needs aggregate in the color and enough of one batch to keep a series consistent; a print needs ink. That is why a gold, a green, a blue and a red turn up on this page and not on the other one.
Reading a terrazzo look listing
Two fields settle what you are looking at. The material field tells you whether a tile is porcelain or a cast cement product, which is the distinction that actually matters here. The finish field tells you whether it reads as anti-slip or plain matte.
For the cast cement original, terrazzo tile is the other page. For the rest of the printed faces on the same bodies, porcelain tile is the full range.
