Decorative Tiles: Ideas and Recommendations for Renovating Your Home

The world of decorative tiles is extremely diverse, able to satisfy a wide variety of tastes and create vastly different atmospheres. In this article, we explore this world, shedding light on materials, shapes, and textures. In particular, we focus on porcelain stoneware tiles and help you navigate the Panaria catalogue so that you can find the right product to bring your unique vision of home to life.

Decorative ceramic tiles for walls and floors are characterised by patterns, textures, and colours that make them a striking aesthetic addition to any space. In addition to their practical function, they add a distinct personality to the room in which they’ve been installed, fitting right into well-defined styles, ranging from classic to modern and from rustic to sophisticated.

Decorative Tiles for Walls: Creative Solutions for Adding a Touch of Style to Any Environment

Decorative tiles are much more than just a wall covering: they are a true interior design element that adds personality and character to any environment. There are a wide variety of decorative tiles available on the market, able to suit every taste and need.

The Materials of Decorative Tiles

Majolica tiles: these hand-painted tiles, typical of the Mediterranean tradition, are the perfect choice for those who love colour, the rich lustre of glazed surfaces, and botanical or geometric patterns.
Artisan terracotta tiles: unique and high-quality handcrafted tiles that require regular maintenance and extra care to prevent permanent stains.
Cement tiles: artistic handcrafted tiles for floors and walls (also available in a hexagonal shape) made from Portland cement and marble powder and using iron oxides to colour the mixture. Their surfaces are decorated with botanical or geometric patterns.

Natural stone mostly offers decorations related to how the material was processed. More than the colour, it’s the design and – very often- the raised texture that characterises this category of decorative tiles: grooving, chiselling, sandblasting, polishing, and engraving of various motifs, whether done with a laser or chisel.
Porcelain stoneware tiles: strong and durable, this advanced ceramic material is perfect for both flooring and cladding, in any type of environment, including outdoors. With the ability to realistically mimic any other natural or handcrafted material, the range of decorations available on the market is extensive.
Other materials are much less commonly used and therefore offer a much more limited range of aesthetic options. Among these, it’s worth mentioning glass (from mosaic to coloured glass tiles), leather (for an all-natural feel and a look in which signs of ageing are an added value), and metal (for an industrial-chic touch with a strong contemporary aesthetic).

Shapes

In addition to the most commonly used shapes (square and rectangle), you may be tempted by more original and more “decorative” formats, though these are, ultimately, more traditional. Calling them “decorative”, highlights their ability to not only clad a space, but to characterise it solely through their shape, regardless of graphic textures and colours. These can be seen as “classic” formats because they manage to look ancient and modern at the same time:

hexagonal shape, perfect for giving a sense of movement to a surface with a dynamic, yet harmonious geometric pattern;
listellos: ideal for vertical cladding or for creating decorative edges;
irregular formats create a rustic and handcrafted effect. They achieve this by creating a surface made up of irregular shapes or with irregular edges. In this case, in addition to not being rectified, they feature deliberate imperfections that emulate, for example, split stone or handcrafted terracotta;
mosaic tiles: their small size makes it possible to create intricate and, sometimes, personalised compositions, even ones that resemble pixel-art graphics.

Le texture

Quanto all’estetica del rivestimento, il vero limite è la fantasia. Sul mercato si trovano decori di qualsiasi ispirazione (floreali, geometrici, figurativi o astratti) ciascuno interpretato secondo gli stili più diversi e spesso in più di una variante cromatica. Qui gli unici criteri da tenere in considerazione nella scelta sono il proprio gusto e la coerenza del soggetto col progetto di interior design complessivo. Non va dimenticato che, specie per le piastrelle di piccolo formato, anche il colore può rivelarsi uno strumento decorativo potentissimo. Similmente a quanto avviene per il mosaico (o per la pixel art), infatti, la dimensione ridotta del formato consente di creare pose con pattern e disegni generati dall’accostamento di pezzi monocromatici.

Characteristics and Benefits of Decorate Porcelain Stoneware

Porcelain stoneware is a type of industrial ceramic produced through an innovative process that makes it exceptionally durable and versatile. The raw materials are heated to temperatures close to their melting point, which makes this material extremely compact. This results in extraordinary technical characteristics, which are highly valued in various applications: flooring, cladding, worktops, facades, pools, and large public spaces, also outdoors. Of these characteristics, particular emphasis must be placed on the virtually non-existent porosity, something which makes porcelain stoneware non-absorbent and impervious to dirt.

In contrast to handcrafted ceramics and cement tiles, porcelain stoneware guarantees total integration of the decorative surface with the body of the tile. In fact, the decoration is applied before the tile is fired, a process that leads to vitrification, or the near fusion of various components into a new, ultra-compact material. This results in decorated tiles with outstandingly durable colours and patterns, far surpassing those of handcrafted products.

Today’s decorative technologies achieve astonishing levels of detail, but that’s not all. They also increase the variety of graphics that can be applied to tiles, resulting in surfaces with few identical pieces and which are difficult to distinguish. Thanks to this characteristic of porcelain stoneware, industrial tile cladding tends to replicate the same variability as that of artisan tiles, in which every single piece is unique.

Styles and Trends in Interior Design According to Panaria

Now let’s take a look at today’s most popular trends in decorative ceramics and how Panaria interprets them, starting with vertical surfaces.

Decorative Tiles for the Kitchen and Bathroom: Styles and Trends in Interior Design

When it comes to decorative tiles, bathrooms and kitchens are the environments that, traditionally, most use textures, mosaics, cement tiles, and colourful elements. However, the world of interior design is ever-more frequently choosing ceramic decorations to enhance niches, wainscoting, or entire walls in any residential or commercial environment. Let’s see how, with examples from Panaria’s catalogue:

Wallpaper effect: from botanical motifs to organic patterns, as well as geometric shapes and photography, striking, large-format decorations (all the way to over-sized, ultra-thin slabs) are gaining in popularity. Panaria embraces this trend with the Glam collection, a project that comes in three moods (natural, geometric, and textured) and in a versatile and practical format (50x100 cm) that’s just 3.5 mm thick.
Geometric decorations continue to be popular, in both two-tone colour schemes (like the Gems mosaic from the Eternity marble-look collection) and in a chiaroscuro version that plays with the three-dimensionality of typical metalworking techniques, as seen in the Blade metal-look collection.
Cement tiles: this classic decoration, which combines simplicity and sophistication, lends itself to being used for vibrant and varied backsplashes, in bathrooms and kitchens that are never dull. It’s also perfect for cladding service counters, partitions, niches, and small dividing walls. Fans of this style will appreciate the Memory Mood series, where they will find nine designs featuring intense and highly contrasting colours, suitable for both floors and walls.
Vibrant colour: unlike flooring, cladding offers the opportunity to experiment with bold colours. One way to do this is to use a small format tile in rich, textured hues (like those in the Workshop series). Another option is to explore the numerous and colourful patterns of a cladding series that uses colour in a totally unique way. Even offers six coloured cements and nine decorations featuring the trends we just looked at, including relief.

Decorative Floors: Options and Ideas for Personalising Your Space

Valutiamo ora due opzioni dall’eleganza classica e intramontabile per decorare un pavimento. Entrambe chiamano in causa due look di grande successo come il marmo e il legno:

the central carpet consists of a rectangular floor decoration typically placed in the centre of the room, or in a significant portion of it, as one would place a luxurious rug. Typical of marble floors, this decoration is available in both black and white in theEternity collection.
the Borealis wood-look collection is a porcelain stoneware series that mimics the appearance of coffered floors, an inlaid geometric design used in hardwood floors. Aesthetically striking, this kind of flooring is now realistically replicated by the Baroque and Planks decorations.