What makes glass a different material
A ceramic or stone tile has a surface and a body, and the surface is what you see. Glass has no distinction between the two. Light enters the piece, travels through it, reflects off whatever is behind it and comes back out, which is why a glass tile looks lit from inside on a bright wall and flat on a dark one.
It is also why glass takes color the way it does. In most of this range the color is in the glass itself and has depth to it, though a smaller group works the other way, with a coating or a metal leaf applied behind a clear piece so the color is seen through the glass instead of in it.
Blue, green and the colors glass owns
Blue leads this range and it is the only material in the catalog where that is true. Gray and white follow, then green, beige and brown. Stone is led by neutrals because that is what comes out of the ground, and fired tile follows stone because most of what it is asked to look like is stone.
Glass is made rather than found, so the palette runs wherever a maker takes it: Cobalt, Cerulean, Sky, Silver, and a long tail of named colors behind them. That is also why the greens here have no equivalent in stone, where green means a serpentine or a slate and stops there.
Glossy, matte and metallic
Glossy is the overwhelming majority and it is the finish people picture when they picture glass. Matte is the second group, made by etching or sandblasting the face, and it turns a bright color into a soft one without changing the color itself.
A smaller metallic group carries a coating or a leaf behind the glass, and a satin group sits between glossy and matte. There is also a mixed group where glossy and matte pieces share one sheet, which is how a single-color mosaic gets texture without a second color.
Mosaic sheets, subway and pencil liners
Most of this range arrives as a foot-square mesh sheet, which is why 12x12 dominates the size list and why very few of those numbers describe an actual piece of glass. Under it sit the shapes: hexagon, herringbone, penny, arabesque and the brick patterns.
The subway formats are separate products: 3x6 and 3x12 pieces sold as tile rather than on mesh. So are the pencil liners, half-inch strips a foot long or a little under, which exist to cap a run or divide a field and are counted in linear feet on a wall instead of in square feet.
Glass on a floor
Very little of this range is made for one. The published usage across these products is overwhelmingly walls, backsplash and shower walls, with a small group rated for interior floors and a handful for a shower pan.
Those few are the anti-slip mosaics, where the face is textured for the purpose. For a floor across a whole room the porcelain tile and ceramic tile ranges are where the floor-rated bodies are, and a glass border set into a porcelain field is the usual way glass gets onto a floor at all.
Thickness and what sits behind the sheet
Most of this range sits between 4 mm and 10 mm, which the listings write as 13/64 and 3/8 of an inch, with a thicker group around 11/16 in the decorative pieces. Thin is normal for glass and it is not a weakness: a sheet on a wall is doing nothing structural.
What thickness changes on glass is translucency. A thinner piece lets more of what is behind it show through, and on a transparent color that means the wall itself becomes part of the finished look, which is true of almost nothing else at tile size.
Glass in a shower and around water
Glass absorbs essentially nothing, which is the property that put it in wet rooms long before it reached a kitchen. A shower wall, a bath surround and a pool lining are all places where a zero-porosity surface is worth more than a hard one.
The distinction in a shower is between the walls and the pan. Walls are what most of this range is published for; a pan is a standing-water surface and the pieces made for one are the textured mosaics. The shower tile range separates the two.
Fire glass
A small group here is not tile at all. Crushed fire glass is tumbled glass sold loose by the bag to fill a gas fire pit or a burner tray, where it holds and radiates heat and replaces the ceramic logs.
It sits on this page because it is the same material, and it is the one product in the range with no wall behind it. Titan Brown and Copper Brown are the colors it comes in here.
Where glass sits in the catalog
Glass is a wall and accent material in almost every job it appears in, so it neighbors the ranges organized the same way. The backsplash tile page is the closest one by use, and mosaics collects the sheet formats across every material.
For the pieces that finish an edge or divide a field, the trim range holds the profiles, and the liners on this page do the same job in glass.
