How to decorate with tiles outside the kitchen and bathroom

When it comes to using tiles for a decorative purpose, the sky, or your imagination, is really the only limit. As with Anna’s tiled chimney breast, tiles have long been used to frame fireplaces, especially as they are a fire resistant material. However, they can also be used to highlight other architectural elements.

In the sitting room of Carolina Irving’s house in Portugal we see more beautiful tiles, this time on the floor. The deep emerald tiles were made locally in the town of Setúbal, with an ancient tin-glaze technique that the designer notes wryly is ‘not quite safe for eating off, but perfectly fine to have underfoot’.

Dean Hearne

‘Tiles bring an unexpected lift to a scheme when used to accent dado rails, cornicing, ceilings or even the upstands of staircases (the section between each step). We’ve also used them to line the back of a home bar and highlight windowsills or niches,’ Melissa Hutley, Hutley & Humm co-founder and interior designer, shares. Using them in this way brings colour, texture, and a bespoke quality to a scheme, making a space feel unique.

For Balineum’s Sarah Watson, arches are one of her go-to suggestions for using tiles to highlight the architecture of a house. However, her favourite option is tiling an entire space to create a dramatic look. ‘For a dining nook, interior designer Sophie Ashby commissioned a bucolic tiled mural by artist Anna Glover that we made in our British factory. To see a pattern emerge over an expanse of tiles – not just a single tile on repeat provides a huge amount of joy,’ Watson shares.

From a material standpoint, tiles are very well suited to some areas of the home. ‘We often use tiles in back-of-house areas where a more durable finish is required, but also as flooring in dining rooms, orangeries, and spaces that connect to outdoor living. They’re a brilliant way of introducing both practicality and character into areas that see a lot of use,’ Hutley advises.

In her Surrey cottage, artist Rachel Bottomley discovered green vertical tiles on the steps up to the hallway in an antique shop in India, and paired then with raspberry-coloured equivalents to create the patterned step.

Dean Hearne

The practical part: how to choose and style your tiles

Not all tiles are made equal so it’s always important to check the tiles you are using will work in the space you have envisioned. ‘Look at the size of the tiles in relation to the space so you know if they’ll need to be cut down and think about the edges if they’re going to be visible,’ interior designer Octavia Dickinson shares.