Shape Up Your Surfaces With New Tile Textures and Forms
Technology has taken our movies, TV shows and printing into three dimensions, and now it’s taking tile there. Tile not only has taken on textures like damask, stacked stone and textiles in its new looks, but has also become an integral part of architecture, with sculptural tiles adding new dimensions to walls. Tiles bump, undulate, weave, wave, crimp, crumple, create rhythms and draw our hands, which cannot resist touching them to check them out. Philippe Starck has even turned the way we look at joints between tiles upside down. Here are some of the most interesting innovations I saw at the spring 2013 Coverings stone and tile show in Atlanta.
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Patterns with large-scale shapes. Separate tiles work together here, meeting at the corners to create new shapes; it’s like the wall was a large crumpled-up piece of paper that’s been somewhat smoothed out. Shown: Apavisa |
Inspired by stacked stone.This look is a more uniform and contemporary take on stacked stone’s popular aesthetic.
Shown: Archistone byCeradisa
Sculptural patterns. These patterns on wall tiles play with light and shadow and give the whole wall an artistic quality as well as depth.
Shown: Lamosa
Tiles with different levels and textures. Famed designer Philippe Starck has a new line called Flexible Architecture for Sant’Agostino that approaches tile installation in a new way. “The ugly joint used to be a problem; now the ugly joint becomes more than the advantage. It becomes a reason to exist,” Starck explains. Think of the flat area between the shiny squares here as expanded joints.
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Shape Up Your Surfaces With New Tile Textures and Forms
