A Guide for Choosing Your Bathroom Tile

Sources: Cast Iron Tub | Bathtub Filler | Round Jute Rug

If you’ve ever been to a tile store, you know how easy it is to get overwhelmed. There seems to be an endless selection of colors, materials, and patterns. So how do you decide which bathroom tiles are for you?

Trust me, it’s not always an easy choice. In this article, I’m going to share the key elements that we considered when choosing our master bathroom tile.

Keeping With Your Style

Before we even thought about picking out bathroom tiles, we needed to decide on the overall style for our master bathroom design. Did we want a trendy look or did we want to keep it simple and classic?

We decided to go with a light and airy bathroom that I would say is pretty classic, but with some modern touches. We felt like going this route with the design would give us more of a timeless look.

Sources: Black Mirrors | Wall Sconces

Anytime we build or remodel a house, we always try to choose finishes that are timeless. But in our experience, trying to keep things timeless on the interior is more difficult than the exterior. On the interior, you have a wider variety of finishes, and trends and design styles change so quickly.

What seems to go out of style the quickest are lighting and tile. Lighting is pretty easy to swap out with the times, but tile…not so much.

Sources: Shower Wall Tile

It is a big job to replace bathroom tile. This is why we always try to choose tiles that are not too crazy, so to speak. But that’s not to say you shouldn’t have fun with your tile choices. Ultimately it comes down to what you like and what fits the style you are going for.

Choosing a Bathroom Tile Color

As I mentioned above, we wanted our bathroom to be light and airy. So we went with a very light color palette. We used two different bathroom tiles: Winter’s Peak for the shower walls and Crystal Canyon for the floor. Both are from Jeffrey Court who, I must say, has an incredible selection of tile!

This light backdrop of the bathroom tile created an awesome amount of contrast with the pops of black we added to the room: lighting, tub, and faucets.

If you want to use a dark bathroom tile, I would recommend going with a light paint color on the walls and ceiling. If you plan on doing dark walls, I would stick to a lighter tile.

Picking a Material

Without a doubt, natural materials like marble are typically more beautiful than man-made materials. But you need to be smart about where you use them. Marble and other natural stones are porous and can stain easily. So a shower, with all of the shampoo and soap, might not be the smartest place to use them.

This is why we decided to use Winters Peak for the bathroom tiles on the shower walls. It’s a white ceramic tile that has beautiful veining making it look like marble.

Even though we did use natural stone on the floor, we felt like using ceramic on the walls would cut down on maintenance.

But this isn’t to say you can’t use natural materials in the shower. If you do, you need to make sure you use a good sealer and do a good job applying it. This will protect the tile from stains.

Paying Attention to Patterns

Next, you need to think about patten.

If you are going with a field tile, you can have it laid in pretty much any pattern you want, such as brick, herringbone, or basketweave. The possibilities are endless.

However, if you plan on using a mosaic tile, the pattern will be determined for you based on which mosaic you choose. Some mosaic patterns can be very intricate. So you need to decide how busy you want your floor to be.

We ended up going with a mosaic bathroom tile (Crystal Canyon) for the floor because of our curbless shower. We wanted the floor tile to continue seamlessly into the shower and a shower floor needs to be laid with mosaic tile so water can drain properly.

What we love about Crystal Canyon is that it is a timeless material and color, but it is laid in a cool angular pattern. Some of the bathroom tiles have a polished finish and the rest are honed. This creates a beautiful effect when the light hits the floor just right!

For the shower walls, we opted for a brick pattern. Since the pattern of the floor tile was pretty busy, we wanted to keep things simple on the walls.

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