Hertfordshire: Luxury Cloakroom

Alabaster onyx is a large-format marble-effect porcelain with dramatic movement across its face. The warm cream and grey ground carries bold amber and brown veining that shifts tone and direction from tile to tile. At 1200 x 600mm, each tile covers a significant area of wall. That means the relationship between adjacent tiles is always visible and always matters. A tile laid without regard to what sits next to it produces a wall that looks random regardless of how good the material is. Getting a tile with this much character to behave as one coherent surface on the feature wall, while the cream porcelain on the remaining walls sits quietly alongside it without being overwhelmed, takes planning before a single tile goes up.
The second challenge was the corners. No tile trims anywhere in the room. Every external corner had to be mitred, with each tile cut at 45 degrees so the two faces meet cleanly at the edge. On a large-format tile any deviation in the cut angle is immediately visible. There is no trim to cover a mistake. It has to be right first time.

The tiles were sequenced across the feature walls before a single one went up. That means laying them out, reading the veining across each face, and deciding which tile goes where so the movement flows from one panel to the next without stopping. The veining carries through the full run of the feature wall rather than starting again at each joint. The window reveal was treated as part of the same sequence, with the Alabaster onyx continuing into the reveal so the visual flow of the feature wall holds even at that change in plane.
The mitred external corners were cut and installed throughout. The cream porcelain on the remaining walls and floor sits quietly alongside the Alabaster onyx feature wall without competing with it. The gold fixtures tie the whole scheme together. This was a tiling-only project, called in directly by the client, completed in one week. The finish speaks for itself.