Choosing Bathroom Tiles: A Practical Guide

Tile choice is the decision people spend the most time on and the one most often made on appearance alone. Appearance matters, but a bathroom is wet, walked on barefoot, and expected to last 20 years, and the tile has to earn its place on more than looks.

Start with the material

Porcelain is the default for good reason. Fired at high temperature, dense, and with very low water absorption. It does not need sealing, it resists staining, and it is hard wearing. It is available in almost any appearance including convincing stone and timber looks. For most Sydney bathrooms, floor and wall, porcelain is the sensible answer.

Ceramic is softer and more porous than porcelain, and cheaper. It is perfectly good on walls, where it takes no traffic and no standing water. On bathroom floors it is less suitable.

Natural stone including marble, travertine and limestone is genuinely beautiful and behaves differently from a manufactured tile. It is porous, so it needs sealing on installation and resealing periodically. It reacts to acidic cleaners, so bathroom products can etch it. It varies in size and thickness, which makes laying it slower. Choose it because you want stone, not because you want a stone look, and be honest about the maintenance.

The differences are set out in more detail here.

Then check the slip rating

Bathroom floors get wet and are walked on barefoot. Tiles carry slip resistance ratings, and floor tiles in a wet area should have one appropriate for the use.

This gets skipped constantly because it is not the exciting part of the showroom visit. It matters most in households with older occupants or young children, and it is not something you can improve after the tile is down.

Wall tiles carry no such requirement, which is exactly why running a chosen wall tile across the floor needs checking first.

Then size

Larger formats mean fewer grout lines, a calmer surface, and less grout to clean. They demand a flatter substrate, because a large rigid tile spans any dip in the floor and shows it as lippage at the edge. Large format tiles are worth understanding before committing.

Smaller formats and mosaics conform to falls better, which is why they are common on shower floors where the surface has to slope towards the waste in more than one direction. They take longer to lay and leave far more grout to maintain.

Standard formats are the middle ground and suit most walls.

In a small bathroom, larger tiles usually help, at the cost of more waste from cuts.

Then the floor and wall decision

Using the same tile throughout, or closely related tones, makes a room read as one volume rather than a set of surfaces. Strongly contrasting floor and wall draws a horizontal line that boxes a small room in.

There is no rule against a feature. Just be aware that bold permanent choices date faster than anything you can swap out.

Specific guidance on each surface: bathroom floor tiles and bathroom wall tiles.

Do not forget the grout

Grout is 5 percent of the surface and a large share of how the finished room reads.

Colour. Matching grout to tile makes the surface read as one plane. Contrasting grout emphasises the grid, which is a legitimate choice with subway tile and a poor one with a busy floor. Mid tones are far more forgiving to keep looking clean than brilliant white on a floor.

Joint width. Driven partly by the tile. Rectified tiles with precise edges take a narrow joint. Pressed tiles with slightly variable edges need a wider one to absorb the variation.

Where grout does not go. Internal corners and the wall-to-floor junction get silicone, because those junctions move and grout cracks when asked to flex.

Buy properly

Order about 10 percent extra for cuts and waste, more in a small room with many cuts or for a diagonal or herringbone layout.

Order the entire job in one batch. Tile shade varies between production runs, and a second delivery months later to finish a wall can be visibly different.

Keep the offcuts. A box in the garage is what lets a chipped tile be replaced years later with an exact match instead of a compromise. Fixing a chipped tile is far easier when you have spares.

Look at samples in the room

Showroom lighting is designed to flatter and is nothing like a north-facing Sydney bathroom at 7am, or an internal apartment bathroom with no window at all.

Get samples home, put them in the actual room, and look at them morning and evening before committing.

When you are ready

We tile bathrooms across Sydney and are happy to advise on selections before you buy. Our tiling services cover supply and installation, and our cost guide sets out rates.