Choosing Tiles For A Small Bathroom

Factors to Keep in Mind When Selecting Tiles For Small Bathrooms

No matter who you ask, everyone has a different opinion on the sizes of tiles you should use for your bathroom floor, especially if you’re trying to make your small bathroom feel larger. So which advice should you take on board and which should you ignore?

When choosing your floor tiles, there are a few factors you need to keep in mind. Firstly, it’s important to consider the look and feel you would like to display to your guests and most importantly the look and feel that you yourself would like – it is you who will be seeing and using this room every day after all! As with everything that comes to interior design, choosing the right bathroom tiles for your project is very subjective as everyone has different tastes, wants and needs.

Tile Size

The bigger the tiles, the smaller the room will look…or so they say. Generally, interior designers will say that you shouldn’t use large tiles (such as 60×60 cm or 80×80 cm) in a small bathroom as it will make the room look smaller. On the other hand, if you use a small tile for your small bathroom, then there will be more grout lines, this will also make your bathroom look small… so what should you do!?

You could either use medium sized tiles or you could choose larger tiles, just make sure that it has rectified edges and you use a grout colour that matches them. This will make your larger tiles flow better, and the scale of the room will not be disrupted. This will also create a simplified, modern space which will be your ‘blank canvas’.

Colour Scheme

It’s also advised that you should choose a neutral colour scheme for your small bathroom. Choosing lighter colours for your bathroom tiles, such as white, cream or even a light grey, will help make your small bathroom look that much bigger, thanks to the tiles reflecting more light than darker coloured tiles would.

These light tiles enable the eye to ‘flow’ across the room, and if also used on walls, they will make your ceiling look higher.

*images sourced from Pinterest.

Fixtures

The choice and placement of your fixtures and fitting in your bathroom can also affect how small your bathroom would look. If you have a small bathroom, installing large taps, sinks and other fixtures will make it look overcrowded and cramped. Choose modern, sleek fittings that work with the size of your bathroom to keep everything in proportion. It’s important to map this all out in a scaled drawing before you start building or renovating. (See our blog article on How to Design a Bathroom for guides).

Tile Layout

Our final tip in making your small bathroom look bigger is to lay your tiles in a diagonal pattern. Diagonal patterns trick our minds into thinking that a space is bigger than it really is. We don’t see the normal squared tiles when laid this way, so our eyes are instead drawn to the diagonal points while our brain has a lot more trouble figuring out how many tiles are actually there.

Another way to make small bathrooms look bigger is to use rectangular tiles, like a size 30×60 cm. If you lay rectangle tiles horizontally or on their side going up the wall or along the floor, this will give the illusion that the walls are wider than they actually are. If you lay the same tile vertically, you will make the room look taller or the room longer if used on the floor.

*images sourced from Pinterest.

These are just guidelines that you can use. The choice of design is ultimately up to you!

For more renovation tips and design inspiration, and to see our wide range of tile products, why not visit one of the Tile Wizards store showrooms, in and around: