Herringbone Pattern Wood-like Tile Design Ideas & Installation
This week and this coming week, we’re going to take a look at two different types of tiles that are made to look like wood. This fad, of ceramic made to look like wood, became popular a few decades back but these tiles are a little bit different. It’s also interesting here that they’ve installed these tiles on the herringbone (technically a chevron) pattern because that’s also a little bit unique. We’ve looked at other examples of herringbone tile here in the past. We’ve seen the patterns of this type used both in floor and wall installations
The herringbone pattern is one of the more elegant types of layouts. Generally, the herringbone pattern requires an elongated rectilinear tile, generally a thin rectangle shape. If you try to do a herringbone pattern with a proportionally shorter tile, the effect really doesn’t work. Instead, with a square tile, for example, the pattern just becomes a staggered diagonal.
Here, this wood plank looking tile has been installed on a wall surface. It’s not a typical wall, it’s the knee wall underneath a bar top. The lighting at the top of the knee wall, shining downward really accentuates the texture of the tile. This particular tile wouldn’t work well for a floor installation because such an extreme texture creates an uncomfortably uneven surface in flooring. For example, if you were to run a roller bag across the surface of a floor made with tiles like this, it would rattle all about.
At a wall installation though, that type of problem doesn’t matter. It’s funny to us that this type of tile was even created because it’s made to mimic a salvaged type of wood like pallet boards or something. It is interesting how salvaged boards became popular.
We can actually see the appeal but it doesn’t seem like something people would have predicted 75 years ago in the middle of the mid-century design heyday. The rustic industrial salvaged style of design sounds very similar to the country design aesthetic but it’s extremely different, at the principles of its core. Even though it might sound similar, they’re actually based on different concepts. Really understanding the progression of the evolution of design styles, you can see that the country design style, although it sounds like it has some similarities, really wasn’t a predecessor to this more contemporary salvage material design style.
Although we may understand the appeal of rustic elements interspersed with more contemporary elements, the use of the herringbone pattern with this type of intentionally rustic looking tile seems odd. Generally, wood tiles are installed in a half lap or one third running bond type of pattern. We generally would encourage innovative uses of building materials, but you have to think through the idea or the visual message that the design is intended to convey. They’ve also used coat hooks underneath the bar top.
We think that’s a good idea.People generally like having a place to hang a purse or a jacket when they’re sitting at a bar. It could be useful. Here though, they used an extremely basic door hook that you might find on the cheapest type of installation like the back of a six-panel hollow core pressboard door. Although the color of the hooks matches the black frames of the bar stools, the style of the hooks clashes with everything else.
In addition to the texture at the surface of the tile itself, there’s another particular type of detail that’s similar but different that’s being accentuated by the directional light. Directional light like this comes from a low angle in relationship to the plane of the tile. In other words, it’s almost in line with that particular plane and washes across the surface of the wall instead of hitting it at a more perpendicular direction. The effect of that type of lighting creates a massively different visual effect.
It really makes the texture stand out. That kind of harsh light is generally good for photographing food but it makes the texture of a wall overly pronounced. Here though, it’s not just the texture of the tile, it’s also the variance in the setting of the tile, in terms of depth against the substrate wall.
If you look you can see some tiles are set deeper than adjacent tile. The dark shadow at the edge of one tile is a sign of lippage. Moderate to decent quality installations require minimal lippage. Generally when checking work from a quality control perspective you may use something as thin as a dime to measure the amount of acceptable lippage from one tile to the next. Larger grout joints will generally have a higher degree of tolerance. The amount of visual impact with larger grout joints in the effect of lippage, from a vision perspective, is greatly reduced.
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