Interiors: Styling tiles with texture and colour

[ad – this post is written in collaboration with Tile Giant, though the content is entirely created by me and reflective on my personal journey with interior design]

Styling tiles…

My passion for interior design has really developed since owning our current home (hopefully a long-term family home for us), which we renovated entirely. Having to think about every single room, from bricks and mortar and sketches on a piece of paper, has been a real challenge and I’ve learnt a lot along the way (and am still learning!)…

Interior frustrations…

One of the biggest frustrations I had when in the midst of our renovation, was having to make decisions quickly. We had decided not to live in the house during renovation, so wanted the majority of the house finished, so we could move in. With various delays, weather issues and set-backs, the project over-ran by about 6 weeks and we were desperate to move in with our little one. So decisions on the interior design aspects of our home were rushed & budget-friendly by that point. Thus meaning, there are things I’d like to change already. But that’s another story…

One element that I wish we’d spent more time on is choosing our tiles

Having lived in the house for nearly 2 years now, we’ve really began to understand how we use our home, interact with each space and how things like light and warmth impact each room. It’s given us a deeper insight into how we can make each room better through interior design.

One element that I wish we’d spent more time on is choosing our tiles. We played it majorly safe I think throughout the house – well, in general. I love our choices, but I suppose they don’t wow me! Or, the could wow me more! Especially in the colour and texture side of things.

My inspiration has always come from the past – I’m much more of a retro or period-inspired kinda gal, over modern or futuristic design. I particularly love Victorian detailing and one of my favourite buildings here in Manchester is Victoria Baths. It is absolutely stunning and covered head-to-toe in beautiful tiling and detail. So when Tile Giant got in touch to tell me about their collaboration with Victoria Baths, my interest was piqued. You can see the full range here. I was asked to pick two of my favourite tiles from the range to style at home in a way I’d like to use them in my house. Always up for a creative challenge and some interior inspiration, I agreed.

Inspired by the Turkish Rest Room at Victoria Baths, I chose to style the Victoria Baths Linear Border Victoria Sage tile with the Victoria Baths Crackle Bevel Vintage Green tile. Green is one of my favourite colours and I feel it’s very on-trend at the moment. I liked both these shades and I always like a bit of depth so the bevel tile would give that.

How I styled my tiles with texture and colour

I like to look at alternative colour families and decided to go with some beautiful blush pinks to style with the shades of green. Texture plays a big part in interior design too, so I opted for velvets, cottons and beautiful vintage pink roses to show how the colours compliment each other. The warmth from a scented candle plays on the ambience you can create with light and dark wooden textures run throughout our home, so I wanted to make sure the styling would work with our existing interior too.

What do you think? How would you style your tiles?

What I’ve learnt along the way is, don’t play it safe with accessories like tiles. We often think these are incidental to our interior design and should just be there to neutralise spaces or provide a pleasant or plain back-drop to the rest of our furniture. When in fact, an element like tiling could and should form the feature of your interior design. Be bold, use pattern, play with textures and colour. Build design around colour and texture, it can really take a room from really nice, to “wow”. I’ll be taking my own advice in future!