Revealed: Top tile choices to refresh our home interiors
Ava Up by La Fabbrica, top left; Färgblock by Tekla Evelina Severin, Tile Expert, right; Reform subway tiles in 60% marble,Tile Style, below left.
Tile trends don’t hurtle along from one season to another. Popular formats, textures, colours and combinations from even the last five years will flow gently into 2025, with nuanced shifts. Here are some refreshing ideas to consider whether you’re doing a DIY splash-back or plotting a full bathroom renovation. Remember, we’re considering a “look” rather than hunting down a single product.
There's a massive market in stunning tiling nationwide so you can find alternative budget buys, offers, flash sales and dupes to realise your vision. Use online virtual design tools to see that tile choice in your rooms before you buy, and ensure the tile is appropriate to the surface (floor/wall/slip-resistance).
When we cement something to the wall or floor, we want to at least believe it will have a decade of appreciation. Fashions can bite you in the behind with second-fix installations.
This year we've noticed a swing to nostalgic, whimsical prints in wall tiling that blew in on the back of cottagecore trending. What I appreciate about the wee-little-old-house rage is that it can play out as period posh or rustic romantic. It has revived an acknowledged classic — a gentle, delightful Edwardian-led aesthetic that’s blessedly easy to live with.
Original Tiles has declared its Cottage Garden Blue to be its Tile of the year 2025. It's a teased-open trellis of cascading cornflower and billowing rose heads so it offers plenty of charm. Becca Keenan, the company's new products designer, describes this blue and white botanical beauty as "reflective of modern chinoiserie décor”.
Flower prints are hardly revolutionary, but unlike the queasy stiff, formulaic horrors of the 1980s, this one has 18 tiles set in a brick bond formation. This creates what’s termed an unbounded pattern-repeat as if painted free-hand. It’s artsy, relaxed, a true modern classic; €59.30 per metre, orginalstyletiles.com.
If you fancy a contemporary floral floor, my choice is Bloom/Aruba, inspired by the traditional colonial flooring found in the islands of the Antilles. It’s a porcelain tile carrying circular stylised blooms. In various colourways, they would look fantastic in a hallway or bathroom creating the continuous repeats of antique matt, encaustic cement tiles; €54 per metre, deluxebathrooms.ie (wall or floor).
The wonderful thing about tiling is that you can pick your period from art deco to Bauhaus and evoke a look without it being an aesthetic thug. Amplify the styling or just trim it back to a couple of square metres. Daring colour in 1970s cool with a calming grey undertone can tenderly rock any space.
Fargblock (colour block in English) is the new ceramic collection developed in collaboration with the influential Swedish designer and colourist Tekla Evelina Severin, for Quintessenza Ceramics of Italy. It offers fashion-forward possibilities for grouting and laying patterns for a unique result.
Use it tone-on-tone or in startling contrasts in Severins’ unique and joyful graphic expressions. It's available in a 5cm x 15cm porcelain stoneware format with a gloss finish and a wild colour range. Prices range from €50.40 per metre, tile.expert.
Consider colour combinations in the same tile staggered into each other for a fascinating finish. The smaller scale deeply pigmented colour and dynamic tile looks are holding their own. This includes the popular pointy-ended favourite, Arrow, from the legendary house of Equipe.
Suited to laying horizontally or vertically, it comes in a range of stunning glossy glazes. From €55 a square yard, suppliers include citytilesandbathrooms.ie. Check out Equipe’s brand new Bali collection if you love your tile super-long and lean.
Textured tiles are adding touch-me pleasures to our showrooms. As an alternative to overarching colour, 3D tiling is a certainty for 2025 with its subtle shadow play and unusual sculpture. Choose from low-relief waves (which break over several tiles), piped-on tracery, or more determined designs that in one solid colour is easy to live with.
Stage textured tiles against flat varieties in the same range, or use a run of textured tiles for a feature splash-back. Ava Up by La Fabbrica of Italy, with its fluted geometric tubes, is distinctive and sophisticated. Like most raised tiling it can be studded into a run of otherwise plain, flat glossies. It's priced at €29.50 per metre, various suppliers including dimora-shop.ie. B&Q's Hopi White Gloss fluted wall tile offers a fresh white rib in ceramic, perfect for today’s rage for simple stacked tile with character; 598mm x 298mm, €39 per metre, diy.ie.
For an extra twist on this or any tile type, discreetly combine matt, gloss, and satin finishes, and try rectified installation without fat grout lines that could complicate the pattern.
There’s a marked return to crafted, irregular, artisan-style materials all over the house, and with tiling, hand-made products with a rich, authentic colour variation are having a moment.
For something both sustainable and charismatic for the floor, take a look at the Reform collection by Ca'Pietra designed originally for paving and driveways in 60% recycled marble. This attractive subway composite is beautiful and unusual in greens, pinks and blues. Be warned, like brick or clay choices, it’s porous and must be suitably sealed. A characterful investment choice from €165 per metre suited to floors and walls, tilestyle.ie.
Moroccan Zellige styles have survived three years of fashion changes, with iridescent, rippled glazed surfacing inspired by a sumptuous, thousand-year heritage. There’s every sign they will be popular in both authentic and inspired varieties in 2025.
As deep, buttery yellows are also strongly favoured for the new year (see Dulux’s Colour of the Year, True Joy), I couldn’t resist the gorgeous handmade clay Zellige tiles in yellow from besttile.ie at €1.20 per piece (€120 per metre). Stone has variations, honed edges, and primal pull of all-natural materials.
Depending on your choice, it doesn’t have to cost a fortune and can be recreated beautifully in both ceramic and porcelain tile. Look for brilliant random digital prints with no perceptible repeats in crystalline veining and inclusions.
Rustic slate styles are being revived. Try out the remarkable shading of slate-look, non-slip Spanish tiles from Royal Stones, 600mm x 300mm x 9mm, just €31 per metre and suited to inside or out, royalstones.ie.
In flooring tile, wood styles are enduring, contemporary winners. They marry perfectly with underfloor heating. Buyers have responded not simply to their ease of maintenance, but to their perceptible sensory textures, colour variations and plank and block styling effortlessly recreated on a warm floor. Porcelain flooring is the choice of commercial premises for its robust handsome face.
Whether you love wide planks or parquet, lighter tones are leading in 2025, overtaking deep walnuts and gloomy greys. This is not simply fashions at play. Dark flooring is less forgiving when it comes to those tumbling dust bunnies and gulps downlight over a wide open-plan area.
Bold, super-sized designs in marquetry blocks and Scandinavian-informed wide-planks are ideal for larger spaces, and room-to-room, stay within one brand, and you can change the format without an aesthetic stutter.
I’m drawn to the Large Plank (20cm x 180cm) Orellana collection in indoor and anti-slip outdoor formats. This can flow under your sliders right out onto the patio. Prices range from €80 per metre, various suppliers, with alternative porcelain wood plank styling for floors and walls from €30 per metre.
