Types of Tiles: A Comparison
With many types of tiles and paving available, it’s worth knowing their various strengths and weaknesses before choosing a particular type. ExoTiles Wall Tiles enables you to compare them and make the best choice when choosing tiles for particular rooms of your home or for outdoor areas. Here, for easy comparison, is a list of some of the more popular types of tile available with their recommended uses.
Granite
Granite is a hard and dense natural stone tile. Polished granite is scratch resistant and has a huge range of available colours to choose from. It’s a popular choice of tile in kitchens and high foot-traffic areas. As a natural stone, however, granite is porous and so isn’t recommended for wet areas such as bathrooms.
Marble
Marble tiles are another natural stone tile with a range of beautiful, unique colours and vein patterns. They’re not as hard-wearing as granite, though, and are also more porous. Marble tiles aren’t recommended for heavy foot-traffic, but are often used in fireplace surrounds as well as walls and low foot-traffic floors.
Porcelain
Porcelain tiles are a highly popular choice of tile for several reasons. They are strong and hard-wearing with impressively high water-resistant and frost-resistant properties, which enables them to be used in just about every environment including outdoors, and high foot-traffic areas. They can be manufactures as glazed tiles with a range of vibrant colour finishes on the surface of the tile or full-bodied tiles where the colour and pattern run through the entire thickness of the tile. If a full-bodied tile is chipped, it won’t show as the colour is exactly the same throughout.
photo/ Prima Porcelain
Ceramic
Ceramic tiles are popular and tend to be less expensive than most other tiles. They aren’t particularly hard-wearing and so aren’t recommended for outdoor areas or indoor high foot-traffic areas. Their beautiful colours and lower price, however, make them an attractive and affordable choice for walls, and low foot-traffic areas.
Limestone
Limestone has a uniquely appealing look but, as a natural stone material, porosity is its main weak point. It’s also easily scratched and its colours are susceptible to fading if it receives a lot of strong sunlight. Limestone isn’t suitable for kitchens or areas with a lot of foot traffic.
Slate
Dark and extremely robust and durable, slate is a natural stone tile that is suitable for kitchen floors and high foot-traffic areas. It’s also a popular choice for kitchen work tops. Slate has a natural texture but can be honed to a smooth finish.
Overall, given its clear advantages and lack of disadvantages, porcelain is fast becoming the more popular choice of all the tiles listed as it is well suited to all environments. Ceramic tiles are more limited in usability but their cheaper price still makes them a popular option. Natural stone tiles, such as granite and marble also have their limitations, such as porosity, but the fact that they are natural materials formed over millions of years of heat and extreme pressure underground is a definite selling point.
Author: Chris Hinchly
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