Small Bathroom Tiles Design: 6 Tips for a Brighter Space
- Introduction
- Small Bathroom Tiles Design: 6 Top Tips To Get The Most Out Of Your Small Bathroom
- Tip #1) Choose A Lighter Shade Of Tile
- Tip #2) Opt For A Larger Format Tile
- Tip #3) Consider Using Tiles With A Glossy Or Polished Finish
- Tip #4) Create Extra Width Or Height With Long Rectangular Tiles
- Tip #5) Think Minimalist When It Comes To Adding Accents
- Tip #6) Match The Colour Of Your Grout To The Colour Of Your Tiles
- Conclusion
- Why Tile Merchant?
Introduction
Not all of us are fortunate enough to have the big, bright and airy bathroom of our dreams.
Despite being one of the few absolutely necessary rooms in a house, bathrooms, toilets and shower rooms often seem to have been thrown in at the end of the architect’s initial design.
What does it mean? Our bathrooms can often be small, awkwardly shaped and without natural light.
Thankfully, having a small bathroom doesn’t have to mean that it feels small, dark or cramped. With the right choice of tile for smaller washrooms, it’s actually quite easy to give the bathroom a new lease of life.
Depending on the bathroom tiles you use, you can create the illusion of a much more spacious, lighter, and altogether roomier bathroom than you were left with when you first moved into your home.
In this guide from the style and interior design experts at Tile Merchant, we’ll walk you through our 6 top tiling tips and our best suggested tiles for small bathrooms, to help you make a lot out of a little. Let’s crack on!
Small Bathroom Tiles Design: 6 Top Tips To Get The Most Out Of Your Small Bathroom
If you’re in need of some top tips to turn a small, dingy bathroom into a big, bright and beautiful one, then read on!
With the right small bathroom tiles design, you can make even the tiniest space feel bigger, brighter, and more inviting.
These 6 tiling tips to dramatically change your bathroom, toilet or shower room for the better, but the more you do, the more space and light you’ll create!
Tip #1) Choose A Lighter Shade Of Tile
One of the major drawbacks of a small bathroom is the lack of light. It's known that how happy or sad we feel in a space can be influenced by the effect of natural light design.
Many bathrooms are situated in parts of the home which get no natural light at all, whilst even those with windows to the outside world are likely too small to draw much brightness at any given point in the day.
Which is where light-coloured tiles come in...
Choosing a light colour or shade of bathroom tile helps vastly increase the brightness of the room by bouncing what little light there is, be it from a window, ceiling light or LED mirror, around the room until it reaches every corner and every surface. A carefully chosen small bathroom tiles design can further enhance this effect, making your space feel even brighter and more spacious.
Moreover, the lightness of the colour itself adds a powerful sense of brightness, lightness and airiness to even the dingiest understairs toilet.
Tile Merchant recommends:
- Cream tiles or beige tiles
- White bathroom tiles
- Light grey bathroom tiles
- Soft pastels and light neutral coloured tiles, such as a dusty pink
Tip #2) Opt For A Larger Format Tile
Quite possibly the best piece of advice we can give anyone in need of a quick, easy, impactful small bathroom glow-up is to pick large-format or extra-large-format tiles for their renovation.
To make a small bathroom look and, more importantly, feel bigger, it’s important not to make it feel busy with lots of decoration or grout lines, like you’d get if you chose smaller tiles to do the job.
To learn more, read the benefits of large format tiles: Large Format Tiles - Perfect Tiles for any Room and Space
With large-format tiles, however, the number of grout lines is dramatically reduced, tricking the eye into thinking the space is much bigger than it actually is. The long vertical or horizontal lines of large tiles help to stretch out the space, and are thus particularly effective as bathroom floor tiles.
Pro Tip: Installing large bathroom tiles to make a small bathroom seem bigger doesn’t mean you can’t still use smaller tiles elsewhere in the redesign; we’d simply recommend you keep the use of small tiles to accenting specific areas, such as the shower surrounds or sink backsplash.
Tile Merchant recommends:
- Large-format porcelain or ceramic tiles measuring 30x60cm or bigger.
- Wood effect tiles.
Living in Ireland? Visit a Tile Merchant store today and explore our stunning range of tiles and home improvement products!
Tip #3) Consider Using Tiles With A Glossy Or Polished Finish
Just as lighter coloured tiles help to raise the brightness of a small bathroom, glossy bathroom tiles (also known as polished tiles) further increase the degree to which light is bounced and reflected about the room.
Top Tip: We highly recommend glossy porcelain tiles in bathrooms, but only for the walls. Glossy floor tiles can become slippery when wet, so we’d recommend light-coloured, matt-finished floor tiles for your small bathroom design instead.
Tile Merchant recommends:
- Polish tiles for wall accents
- Glossy porcelain tiles for your small bathroom walls
Tip #4) Create Extra Width Or Height With Long Rectangular Tiles
REMEMBER:
- Horizontal Layout: Makes the bathroom appear wider.
- Vertical Layout: Makes the ceiling feel taller.
- Best Options: Subway tiles or plank-style tiles.
Depending on the layout of your small bathroom, toilet, shower room or washroom, there are certain tricks you can use to make a squat room feel taller, and/or a thin room feel wider.
To make a short bathroom feel taller than it is, try using long rectangular tiles placed vertically so that their lines direct the eye upwards, giving the impression of greater height. Similarly, to make a thin bathroom feel wider, place those same rectangular tiles horizontally.
Tile Merchant recommends:
- Long plank-style tiles, like our wood-effect porcelain floorboards
- Subway tiles (also known as metro tiles)
Bonus tip: Subway tiles are super easy to clean (they were specifically designed to be), so they make excellent bathroom tiles!
Tip #5) Think Minimalist When It Comes To Adding Accents
It can be tempting to want to hang lots of pictures, install lots of bathroom accessories and extras, and generally pack a newly-renovated room full of accents.
Unfortunately, when space is limited, putting too much into it can have an adverse effect, ultimately making the space feel crowded and undoing all your hard work in trying to make it feel nice and big and bright!
Think minimalist when adding accents, limiting the degree of detail you add to things like borders, nooks, niches and backsplashes.
Tile merchant recommends:
- Light-hued patterned tiles
- Neutral-coloured mosaic tiles
Tip #6) Match The Colour Of Your Grout To The Colour Of Your Tiles
Last but not least, a piece of advice for tiling a small bathroom which most folk tend not to consider: matching the colour of your grouting to the colour of your tile.
Here at Tile Merchant, we stock a variety of different coloured grouts to give our customers greater variety when it comes to designing their own unique interior style.
When renovating a small bathroom to make it feel bigger and brighter, matching the grout to the tile has the added bonus of disguising grout lines.
If grout lines are obvious, they work like a grid, helping your brain to subconsciously calculate the size of the room. When hidden, however, your eye tends instead to gloss over the lines and thus pay less attention to the actual size of the room, but rather to enjoy the perceived largeness of the space.
Tile Merchant recommends:
- Browse our different coloured grouts to find the ones which work with your chosen tiles!
Conclusion
The six bathroom tile ideas for small bathrooms we’ve outlined in this guide to making a small bathroom look and feel bigger, brighter and more welcoming can have a seriously positive impact on the room you’ve chosen to renovate.
Simply by taking time to carefully choose the types, colours, grouts and layouts of the bathroom tiles you’ll use when redesigning a bathroom can completely change the way a washroom looks and feels—making it appear much bigger, lighter and airier than it actually is.
For more interior and exterior design style and advice, head over to the Tile Merchant blog front page; or to get started with your journey to a ‘bigger’ bathroom, shop our bathroom tiles today.
All Tile Merchant products are available for round-the-clock delivery to any address in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Free cut samples of most tiles are also available, to try before you buy.
Tile delivery is available seven days a week, direct to your doorstep, wherever you are in Ireland or Northern Ireland.
Why Tile Merchant?
We offer extremely competitive pricing on our entire range of tiles and likewise. We stock a huge range of wall and floor tiles and our prices are competitive for retail and trade. Our stock is widely available in our tile stores in Ireland which are open 7 days a week.
Alternatively, if you’d prefer to shop our tiles online, we can supply you with samples delivered for free.
Article written by Calum
Cal Bannerman is a freelance writer, editor, podcaster and voice actor from the Scottish Borders. He runs the storytelling podcast "Stories from the Hearth" and lives in a wee Glasgow Flat with his partner and their cat".