8 Tips for Nailing the Wood Tile Look
Our top 8 tips when it comes to tiling your home with a wood look finish in mind:
These 8 tips are sure to bring sophistication in a natural manner to your living space!
1) Choose a tile with a subtle wood texture and a pattern or gradient that has been made by inkjet. This enhances the overall effect with a lot of pattern variation. Some of these tiles have as many as ten different pattern variations in each colourway.
2) Since there are pattern repeats, be sure to rotate the orientation of the tiles often to help break up the overall look. You don’t want to be able to spot the same pattern in one glance! Keep your design open to the imagination as this creates a composition that is unusual to the eye.
3) Choose a tile with sharp edges rather than a pressed edge. You can get tighter grout lines with tile that has more exact edges. This is far more appealing as the finished look is slick. Tiles that are not finished with a sharp edge, that have a texture or gradient will not run well in sequence and the overall look will be disruptive.
4) Wood-look tiles come in various forms. These range from ceramic and porcelain to concrete. Porcelain is considered the best choice. It’s super hard-wearing and affordable. These durable tiles are a favourite in many homes as they last longer and keep their look and feel especially in high traffic areas.
5) When choosing a grout colour, find the darkest colour in your tile and choose one shade deeper for your grout colour. This tricks the eye into thinking that the grout lines are shadows around the “wood planks”, especially if you have a sharp edge tile and small grout lines. iTILE sells a range of different coloured grouts that you can choose from.
6) Generally wood tile planks that are at least 40″ long, but 48″ or longer is ideal. Shorter planks can be a give-away and make it harder to trick the eye into thinking the tile is actually wood.
7) If you’ve found a wood tile that you really love, but it only comes in 24 or 30″ planks, like many of them do, try a herringbone pattern with the shorter planks. The proportions will be just right!
8) Sometimes people think it’s a good idea to lay wood tile in a stacked, geometric tile pattern (like a running bond pattern), but that’s another give away that your flooring is not actually wood. Laying the tile in a very random order, just like real wood, helps keep an attractive appeal and real feel.
Those are our best tips for choosing a great wood tile! Compliment these with a fluffy rug in winter to keep warmth in the house.