Myself and my brother Liam just spent 3 days at CERSAIE 2014 in Bologna Italy – the world’s largest tile exhibition and the place where new tile trends are set. We saw some beautiful products perfect for your home or project.
CERSAIE is where suppliers launch their new products. It’s like Paris Fashion Week in the tile calendar. The show itself covers over 150,000 square metres of space. It’s colossal! We saw as much of it as possible and were inspired to order more fabulous tiles for our showrooms from the lines of emerging trends. Here is our summary of current tile trends:
Wood-Effect Porcelain
Wood-effect has been around for a couple of years now and is a best-seller in both our Esher and Esher showrooms. At CERSAIE 2014 we saw even more of it. Some of it so like wood even we couldn’t tell it apart.
The factories have realised that wood-effect isn’t just a competitor for the wood-flooring market it has the ability to stand alone and overtake wood sales. As explained in my blog post the advantages of wood-effect porcelain are endless. Easy to maintain & so easy to clean, hard-wearing; so no chips, scratches or scuffs, hygienic, great for homes with kids and animals – the list goes on.
So now we have large planks and small planks, wide planks and thin planks, coloured planks and decorated planks – you name it we saw it in wood-effect porcelain. And all of it was so incredibly realistic! We will be stocking even more shades and sizes as of next month. It’s one of the tile trends to watch.
Hexagons
Hexagon tiles date back to Roman times but were definitely not looking old at CERSAIE 2014. We saw hexagons in slate, marble, wood-effect, patchwork, large format, small format, patterned and plain. Without a doubt they were the biggest tile trend at the fair.
Concrete-effect Large Format Tiles
If you were hoping to have a concrete floor at home or for your project and then you researched and discovered that they weren’t very easy to look after owing to problems with staining etc… well don’t worry because CERSAIE 2014 had the solution on a huge scale.
We saw every shade, tone, texture of concrete-effect porcelain you can imagine. Dark greys to light greys, grey with beige, grey with blue hues, green hues, textured and smooth, plain and patterned. So fear not, your dreams of a concrete floor will come true – concrete-look porcelain was prolific at CERSAIE 2014 one of the biggest tile trends we’ve seen this year. And in larger and larger formats.
Marble – the timeless classic
I wouldn’t really claim it as one of the current tile trends as marble will always be in fashion on the tile “catwalks”. It’s timeless and it’s classic and it didn’t fail to impress at CERSAIE 2014. We saw book matched marble-effect porcelain. Utterly stunning in large format. If you want the wow factor. Choose marble!
With tired feet and satiated appetites (for food and tiles!) we left CERSAIE 2014 on a high and excited to start selling all of these new tile trends to our customers.