Because porcelain tile is durable, easy-to-maintain, and inherently green, it’s often the interior and exterior floor surfacing material of choice for restaurants and hotels, healthcare facilities, educational facilities, office spaces, and many other non-residential environments. While tile has long been a dependable and cost-efficient workhorse for long-term performance, tile used for flooring in commercial spaces today isn’t all about its functionality, longevity, and cost-efficiency. Commercial building owners also want their floor and wall surfacing to deliver on style, and modern designers now regard floor tile as a key player in the overall design scheme. It’s been a full year since we last took a look at floor tile trends on our blog. Since then, we’ve added a number of new tile collections to our lineup. Here’s a look at what’s happened in floor tile in the past 12 months.
Wood Looks Have Evolved
While classic wood-look porcelain tiles have become a staple of both commercial and residential design, thanks to ever-improving digital technology, wood looks have really evolved to push the aesthetic envelope. Traditional wood looks have become more realistic than ever, exotic species have joined the mix (check out our Tigerwood), and now we’re seeing exciting artistic looks that won’t necessarily fool the eye but will certainly make a design statement. Our Char and Harmony collections are stunning examples of wood interpretations taken to the next level. (You can see all our wood look tile collections here.)
Stone Looks
Always classic and often with a twist, stone look-alikes rendered in porcelain are the answer if you’re looking for a lower-cost and lower-maintenance alternative to the real thing. And then there are the looks! Some collections appear identical to their real-life counterparts and others are decidedly modern interpretations — there’s truly something for every design style. We’ve added Dorato, Neolith, Basaltina, and Harmony to our stone-look floor tile lineup.
Concrete looks
Metallo is our latest concrete-look offering—but it’s certainly not your everyday concrete look with its sleek style and subtle metal sheen.
Terrazzo Looks
Real terrazzo flooring has experienced a tremendous revival in recent years. Made of a composite of marble, quartz, granite, or glass and a binder material, it is poured or cast in place. then ground and polished smooth after it has cured. Authentic terrazzo is a beautiful material for floors, but the laborious process to make it is costly. Thanks to amazing advances in inkjet printing technology, the look can be yours at a fraction of the cost with our Terrazzo porcelain tile line.
Do you know about our new digital Binder Finder? Though our binders are designed to be printed resource materials for your library or showroom, we hope these digital files help you select and specify GIO products. You can download your digital binders here.
GIO is your gateway to beautifully designed, strategically selected collections of floor and wall tile sure to fit your demanding specification requirements and unique style. We look forward to working with you!
