4 Visual Tricks With Bathroom Tile

4 Visual Tricks With Bathroom Tile

See how pros use tile color, size and placement to make rooms appear larger or smaller

Professional designers and builders use tile for many reasons in a bathroom. Tile brings style to a room, makes surfaces waterproof and enhances ease of cleaning. But tile also can perform visual tricks, depending on the choice of color, size and placement. Here, design and building pros show four ways you can use tile to visually expand or contract a bathroom.
K Design

1. Install Tile Vertically to Increase Height

Designer: Kameran Schaffner of K Design
Location: Litchfield Park, Arizona
Size: 40 square feet (3.7 square meters); 5 by 8 feetHomeowners’ request. Kameran Schaffner designed this bathroom for a spec home by a builder-and-developer team. “They wanted something interesting but neutral,” Schaffner says. “The design vision for this home was modern transitional.”

Tile trick. Install rectangular tile vertically to visually enhance the height of a ceiling. Here, glazed clay tile in a warm gray tone for the shower walls delivers the effect. “We chose to lay the shower tile in a vertical stack to make the room appear a bit taller while also giving a more modern flair,” Schaffner says. “This tile is the perfect match to the cleaner-looking floor tile because it has character and texture that adds some depth and richness.”

Other special features. Patterned cement-look porcelain floor tile. Limestone countertop with waterfall end. Sleek wall sconces. Large mirror framed in matte black Schluter edging.

Designer tip. “Budget always plays a factor, and sometimes glass shower enclosures aren’t an option for the builder, to keep cost down,” Schaffner says. “This is always something that can be added later, but until then a great way to give the room a chic finish is by adding a long shower curtain in a solid neutral fabric in front of the waterproof curtain. Once you have the budget, add that frameless glass, but until then your bathroom will still look stunning.”

Luxe Remodel

2. Use Darker Tile on the Bottom Half to Bring a Room Down to Size

General contractor: Oren Levy of Luxe Remodel
Location: Los Angeles
Size: 108 square feet (10 square meters); 9 by 12 feet

Homeowners’ request. “The property was built in the early 1900s and hadn’t been updated for decades,” general contractor Oren Levy says. “The homeowners wanted to convert an existing bathroom into a master and give it a bit of a modern look that would still go with the Spanish Colonial style of their home.”

Tile trick. Use dark tile halfway up the walls to help ground a spacious layout. Here, green square tiles cover the lower half of two walls in the room, while white square tiles cover the upper half. The two-tone effect makes the bathroom feel a little cozier, Levy says, and the dark green color adds depth to the neutral tile palette. “The homeowners wanted to make the bathroom look modern yet timeless,” Levy says. “The mix of white and rich green color square tiles keeps it classic.”

Other special features. Shower bench. Light wood double vanity. Recessed medicine cabinets. Calacatta marble penny tiles cover the main floor and shower floor.

Eisenmann Architecture

3. Create a Bold Tile Destination to Highlight a Narrow Room’s Length

Designers: Stacy Eisenmann and Aska Wieloch-Kim of Eisenmann Architecture
Location: Albany, California
Size: 62½ square feet (5.8 square meters); 5 by 12½ feet

Homeowners’ request. Add a new master bathroom to their California bungalow. “It needed to be narrow, thus the 5-foot width,” architect Stacy Eisenmann says. “They wanted his-and-hers sinks and a comfortable walk-in shower, and were willing to forgo a bathtub.”

Tile trick. Use bold tile at the end of a narrow room to create a destination that highlights the room’s length rather than its width. Here, bold blue ceramic shower tile does the trick. The relative bareness of the side walls emphasizes the destination shower, pulling the eye to the end of the room. The blue tile’s “location on the walls prioritizes the shower so that it feels like a destination within the room,” Eisenmann says. “Its vertical installation accentuates the height of the room. And it was important that the scale and shape of the wall tile and the hexagonal floor tile contrast with each other, so they may each contribute to the design.”

Other special features. “A wall-to-wall skylight illuminates the shower from above to highlight it as a destination, to brighten the darker end of the room and to [help people] see the depth of color in the tile,” Eisenmann says.

Designer tip. “The cool color of the shower is warmed by the teak shower bench and walnut mirrors,” Eisenmann says.

Aptitude Design & Build

4. Install Elongated Tile Horizontally to Stretch a Small Space

Design-build pro: Matt Mierek of Aptitude
Location: Clayton, Missouri

Homeowners’ request. Renovate a penthouse unit to give it a more open floor plan and updated materials.

Tile trick. Install elongated rectangular tile horizontally to visually expand a small space. In this hall bathroom, gray glass tiles cover two walls to visually stretch the room. They “turned out to look really cool and added some pop,” design-build pro Matt Mierek says.

Other special features. Shaded wall sconces. Skylight over the shower-tub combo. White vanity with a marble countertop.

Designer tip. “Keep it open and light, then add some cool pops of texture or color in spaces to bring it all together,” Mierek says.

“Uh-oh” moment. “Our ‘uh-oh’ moment was when we had to go into the unit below and remove and replace their ceiling because the plumbing drains in the unit we were working in needed to be moved,” Mierek says. “It was a lot of coordination and, honestly, something we overlooked when coming into the job. It all worked out great in the end, and everyone was happy.”

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