The first decision: fired or quarried
Porcelain and ceramic are made. Marble, travertine, limestone, slate and granite are cut out of the ground. That single difference explains almost everything else about how the two behave, including why one arrives identical piece to piece and the other does not.
A fired tile is manufactured to a specification, so the twentieth box matches the first. A quarried tile came out of a block, so it carries whatever that block carried. The porcelain and natural stone ranges each go into their own material in full.
Tile sizes across the range
12x24 is the single commonest format here by a wide margin, with 24x48 and 24x24 behind it. Those three are the modern floor sizes, and what they have in common is fewer joints across a room.
At the other end sit the small formats that are chosen for the opposite reason: 3x6 and 3x12 for a wall, 6x6 and 4x4 where the pattern of the joints is the point. A small tile on a large floor is a decision about texture; a large tile in a small room is a decision about cutting.
Finishes and what they do
Matte leads the range, with polished, glossy and honed behind it. Matte and honed describe a surface that does not reflect; polished and glossy describe one that does, the first on stone and the second on a glaze.
A separate group is made as an anti-slip surface, which is a different claim from a texture: it describes what happens under a wet foot rather than how the face is worked. Those pieces carry the word in their name, and that is where the distinction is visible in a catalog.
Shade variation, V1 to V4
Most tile publishes a shade variation rating and it predicts one thing: how much the tiles in a box differ from each other. V1 means uniform, V4 means every piece is visibly its own. Neither is better made than the other.
It matters most when a sample is being judged. A single V4 tile tells you very little about the floor, because the floor is the whole spread and the sample is one draw from it. A V1 sample tells you almost everything.
Where a tile is rated to go
A tile made for a wall may be too thin or too soft for a floor, and the rating is what says so. Where a tile is going on both surfaces in one room, the floor requirement is the one that governs.
Floor tile and wall tile split the range on exactly that line, and outdoor tile holds the thicker pieces made to go outside.
Tile thickness
Most of this range sits between 3/8 inch and 9 mm, which are close enough that the two figures describe the same class of tile written in two habits of measurement. Below that are the thin wall tiles; above it are the thick pieces made to go outside on a base.
Thickness is worth checking when a new tile is meeting an existing floor, because a difference of a few millimeters at a doorway is the thing that turns into a trip edge. It is on every product.
Boxes, coverage and what to order
Tile is sold by the box and boxes are not standardized: the commonest here holds a little under 14 square feet in seven pieces, but the range runs from two pieces to ten and from 10 square feet to 16. The figure that matters is the coverage, not the piece count.
The other number is the allowance. Cuts, breakages and a spare box for a future repair all come out of the same order, and on a high variation tile the spare is the only way to match later, since a second order can come from a different production run.
Finding tile by room
Most people arrive with a room in mind, not a material, and the catalog is divided that way too. Bathroom, kitchen and backsplash each hold what suits them, filtered on the ratings that room needs.
The room pages are the faster route when the decision is still open. The material pages are the faster route when it is not.
Color across the catalog
White leads by a distance, then gray and beige. That is not a fashion so much as an arithmetic: the neutral end of the range carries the most products because it is what most rooms are built around, so it is also where the most choice sits.
The color families run as their own collections, which is the useful way in when a room already has a palette and the tile has to join it rather than start it.
