Milestone: Tile Selection (Part One)

Choosing the right tiles was a tough one. Most of the display homes we visited seemed to favour light coloured flooring in order to make the house look bigger. Light flooring is lovely, however, we also loved the dark floors favoured by images of “designer homes” that we saw online.

Light floor or dark floor? The answer changed daily.

In the end, we left the tile selection to chance. We were at the mercy of the tile store displays. All we knew is that we were looking for either a light grey/white tile or a dark grey/black tile. It appears that brown is in vogue, and this narrowed our selections greatly. Who would have thought it hard to find grey tiles? Thankfully, the fourth tile store we visited had something that we both liked.

Marmo Royal by Ceramica Monica

The winning tile is “Antracite” part of the Marmo Royal series by Ceramica Monica.

Marmo Royal is one of the few series of tiles we found, which offers both 300 x 300 mm and 600 x 600 mm format tiles. This allows us to have matching tiles in both the main and wet areas. This really appeals to me.

I remember seeing a display home in Piara Waters, which had 600 x 600 mm tiles in the main areas and matching 300 x 300 mm tiles in the wet area. It looked stunning. The tiles flowed from room to room and brought each part of the house together. I loved it!



Once we had our floor tiles sorted, it was onto the wall tiles. Like many people, we chose a 300 x 600 mm white tile for our bathroom. You cannot escape the allure of clean, white, bathroom tiles. Unlike many display homes, we did not choose a feature mosaic tile.

Our bathroom is small and narrow. To put a feature tile on one of the walls would be overpowering. In an attempt to make the room look longer, we will be laying our white wall tiles horizontally and using the floor tiles to tile the bath hob.

Ensuite Colour Scheme:
floor tile, feature wall tile

The ensuite, however, is a completely different matter. It is huge! For this room, we have chosen a solid colour feature tile for the back wall. Like the wall tiles, it is a 300 x 600 mm format tile.

Unfortunately, this tile store did not have a large selection of solid colour feature tiles (but they did have an amazing selection of mosaics!). Given the available selection, we chose a matt blue-grey tile. I would have preferred to use a dark charcoal/grey tile as the feature, but unfortunately, they did not have one in the correct size/colour.


As for the rest of our tiles, the laundry splashback will uses the same white tiles as the bathroom wall and we have deleted the kitchen splashback tiling so that we can install a glass splashback after handover. I have my heart set on either a black or bauxite splashback.


Speaking of the kitchen, it is worth selecting your kitchen kickboard colour at the same time as you choose your main area floor tiles. It is amazing how colours can seemingly go together in your mind, but looks completely wrong when you bring them together.

Tip: Most manufacturers offer free samples via their website. Even though you will find the tile stores already have samples, I found it useful having my own, so I could test the different colour combinations at my leisure.