Tiling ideas for the kitchen

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Restauro conservativo del Villino Orsini, Laura Marini Architetto Laura Marini Architetto Walls
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Don’t resign yourself to a boring kitchen when this room offers so many possibilities of pushing design boundaries. You can still stick to traditional, and practical, materials such as tiles while managing to do something very different and special with them. The kitchen may well be the room of your home in which you spend the most time – especially if it also contains your dining area. It’s likely you will welcome many guests into this room; again possibly more than any other. Making an impression is important, so here are some great tiling ideas to help you do so.

​Don’t get stuck on squares

Square tiles might be the most traditional and widely available type, but taking the time to explore different shape options can yield wonderful results, as this image shows. These sweet hexagonal tiles do something quite out of the ordinary, but do it in a very understated way. Their shape is pleasingly reminiscent of a honeycomb in a beehive, but because the variety of colours used is kept to a minimum the effect isn’t too overpowering. The non-uniform, scattered placement of the different shades of tile works brilliantly with this design, too, and the low-hanging pendant lights are placed just perfectly for maximum effect.

​Cosy up to stone

Stone is usually thought of as a cold type of material, and not one particularly conducive to creating a cosy, friendly atmosphere. However in this case the lightly marbled effect of the stone tiles used brings an unusually high level of warmth and colour to the room. The earthy shades seen in some of the tiles dilute the overall chilliness of the dark grey colour, creating an appealing watercolour-like effect. Using larger tiles than would normally be expected allows for several different shades and colours to be contained within a single tile, as opposed to having to alternate different tiles to achieve diversity in colours. This image proves that the result of this approach can be quite impressive. These tiles would fit in well to a living room, bathroom, or hallway too.

​Try tiling unexpected places

In this bar, the tiles that we might normally expect to see on the walls have migrated to the surface of the bar. It would be easy to recreate this look on the worktop of your home kitchen – though the key is, of course, in finding suitably pretty but subtly mismatched tiles. These ones work well because, although no two have the same pattern, they share a particular style that makes it clear they belong to the same family. Each tile also makes use of muted pastel shades from a similar palette.

Continental charm

The traditional European elegance of tiles such as these is not to be overlooked as an option for even the most hyper-modern of kitchen spaces. As these different examples show, there is a whole host of possible ways – varying from the subtlest of influences to full-on Mediterranean cafe – for bringing some continental inspiration into your home. If you want to keep things low-key, a simple border of pretty tiles, as seen in the bottom right-hand corner, would be an ideal way of doing so.

​Pick the right patterns

This beautiful room works so well because the designer has stuck completely consistently to one colour family while getting more experimental with patterns. Interspersing the tiles with big, clear patterns on them with lighter tiles with smaller, less bold patterns reduces the business of the wall significantly. The room appears traditional and modern all at once.

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