How to Choose Bathroom Tile: Size, Grip, Grout and Layout

Choose the floor tile for grip, the wall tile for looks, and no more than three tiles in all. That one sentence settles most bathrooms. The seven tips below fill in the rest, and they matter most in a small room, where every joint is in view.

Think about size

Tile runs from under an inch square to several feet on a side. Large tile can seem wrong for a small bathroom, but it means fewer grout lines, and the floor reads as one continuous surface. Small tile means more grout, and more grout means more cleaning, above all in the shower.

There is one place where small tile is the right choice: the shower floor. It has to slope to the drain, small pieces follow the slope, and their many joints add grip. Large tile also needs a very flat floor beneath it, so in an older building allow for leveling first.

Hold it to three tiles

Most bathrooms use more than one tile, and that is what makes them interesting. Stop at three. Beyond that the sizes, colors and finishes compete and the room feels busy. A single tile everywhere has the opposite problem, so if you love one tile, give it a partner that differs in size, finish or color.

Keep the floor and the ceiling quiet

A neutral floor frees you to be bolder on the walls, because the eye is drawn up to the color. A ceiling painted a neutral tone does the same from above. Between two quiet planes, one strong wall is enough.

Build the palette from one tile

Settling a palette is the hard part. Start neutral, then find the one tile you love and work outward from it. It may be a plain tile you will use almost everywhere, or a rich one used as an accent. Either way, with one tile fixed, the others become easy to choose: lay them beside it and the wrong ones are obvious.

Choose texture for grip

Smooth tile is easy to clean and slippery under a wet foot. Put a tile with some texture on the floor and keep the smooth one for the walls. A little texture is also pleasant to stand on.

There is a number to ask for. Under the tile industry’s standard, a tile for level interior floors that will be walked on when wet should have a wet dynamic coefficient of friction, or DCOF, of at least 0.42. The Tile Council of North America adds that the figure is not a prediction of whether someone will slip and should not be the only thing you judge by (TCNA). Look for it on the data sheet, and ask the supplier which tiles are rated for a shower floor.

Pick tiles that share dimensions

When the sizes are multiples of one another, the grout lines meet and the room looks deliberate. A 12 by 12 inch floor tile, a 4 by 4 inch wall tile and a 1 by 1 inch border will line up joint for joint. It also makes the tile setter’s work cleaner, with fewer slivers at the edges.

Do not forget the grout

Grout helps keep water out of the joints, and its color is part of the design. White grout against a dark tile draws a sharp grid. A grout close to the tile’s own tone nearly disappears. A plain white tile with a bright grout is a cheerful, inexpensive way to be playful. On a floor, a mid-tone grout hides far more than white does.

Before you order

• Look at several whole tiles, not one sample piece, and look at them in the bathroom’s own light.
• Order everything at once, with spares. A later batch may not match.
• Ask how the new floor will meet the hallway floor at the door.
• Ask what goes under the tile. The waterproofing beneath it, not the tile, is what protects the apartment below.

On that last point, our own schedule puts cement board in the wet areas and waterproofs the floor and the shower to the ceiling before any tile goes on. The stages are in the bathroom remodel timeline. Resurfacing a floor is on the Department of Buildings’ list of minor work that needs no permit, though the contractor must hold a city home improvement license (NYC Buildings). For the whole room see bathroom renovation in NYC, and for tile in finished rooms the bathroom gallery. Which materials wear well is the subject of bathroom trends in materials and finishes.

Questions people ask