Installation Equation: A Custom Tile Floor

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Granada Tile is starting out 2014 right—we’ve got lots of news to share and tons of great new cement tile installations to share. In the latter category, we’ve got a fabulous one to show you today. It’s a concrete tile carpet in James Toomey’s Los Angeles–area kitchen. He came across our cement tiles “either through Yelp or Googling. It was all in a blur of Web searching when I was trying to find something artistic and different than the usual marble and single-color tiles that predominate at tile shops,” recalls Toomey. Our Web site caught his fancy, since it shows lots of complete cement tile installations rather than just single tiles. It gave him a great sense of what the cement tile designs might look like in his own project. With so many concrete tile designs to choose from,”The hardest part is just narrowing it down to one because you keep going back and looking again, visualizing how other styles might look,” says Toomey. He and his wife eventually settled on Normandy since it reminded her of her childhood. (For a future project, though, he’s thinking he might go a more Moroccan route.)

Cement tile design selected, Toomey and his wife settled on a palette that works in harmony with the surrounding tiles. A perimeter of bright blue tiles frames the Normandy installation, making it an immediate conversation starter. “The neatest thing about the tile installation is how festive it makes the kitchen feel,” says Toomey. “We’ve had linoleum, tile and hardwood floors in the kitchen over the past 12 years, but this is the first time where I’m actually excited about a floor long after it’s gone in. Most floors tend to fade to the background to the point where you don’t notice them anymore. They’re utilitarian, and as long as they don’t give you splinters or catch your toe you’re satisfied with them, but they usually don’t make you happy, which something colorful and pretty like these can do. “The cement tiles fascinate me because I never even knew such a thing existed until I stumbled onto these. I always assumed it was ceramic or clay, and then to find out all the amazing styles they can create with cement was like finding a chest of delights in the attic,” says Toomey. “They’re a marvelous conversation piece, and it’s fun to find another uninitiated victim whom I can school for 20 minutes about this whole other world of tile that they probably don’t know about.” [subscribe2]

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