Entrances and Hallways
If you live in the UK, you’ve definitely seen original Victorian floor tiles before. In the entrances and hallways of many homes in Britain they’ve survived the test of time. Their placement is no coincidence. Tiles were expensive and impressive, and you’d want to make sure your visitors saw them! Fortunately our tiles have the same wow factor, at a much friendlier price.
You have a few options here. You can pick a repeating pattern to create a beautiful geometric floor, or use black and white tiles in a traditional chessboard pattern. Both choices will give your visitors and guests a Victorian welcome to remember. You don’t need to live in a period house to pull this look off – these tiles are just as home in a postwar semi or a new build.
Bathroom Walls
Creating the perfect base for your beautiful fixtures and fittings is your aim here. Get the Victorian look with smaller, brick-shaped tiles. Create a simple but elegant wall with a flat or bevelled white tile and matching grout.
You can expand on this base in a couple of different ways. Using a contrasting grout, as seen in this image, gives your wall a lot of pleasing symmetry. Using a coloured tile that pairs well with your chosen floor creates a more homely space.
Kitchen Walls & Splashbacks
Not a traditional location for encaustic tiles but a popular one, and its easy to understand why! Strong patterns, like our Granille tile, work well to provide contrast with solid coloured worktops and work really well with natural wood colours in your kitchen.
For modern kitchens in whites and greys where you want to bring more character to your walls without introducing colour, our Nikea grey range is perfect. It is a random mix of patterns, so if you want to keep things super structured a pattern like Paris Bercy brings greige geometric greatness.
Feature Floors
There’s no reason to limit the look to entrances and hallways. Feature floors are an effective way to liven up bathrooms, kitchens and living spaces with plain walls. One advantage of a patterned tile with multiple colours is the palette range it provides, building a beautiful base to (literally) build your space from.
Mixing with modern
Despite first becoming popular over a century and a half ago, the enduring popularity of Victorian tiles is no accident of history. The patterns and designs, ranging from the more ornamental to the stark and simple, are timeless.
Minimalist and modern spaces work beautifully with a Victorian inspired surface, especially monochrome ones like Paris Vivienne.