Spotlight on... Alaska

With another new month comes another new range of tiles. This time we’re swapping the glossy, ceramic Metro tiles and opting for a stunning matte, porcelain tile: Alaska Grey tiles. In an elegant marble-grey, these tiles bring texture to a room through their stone-effect patterns, whilst creating a smooth, soft finish.

Here are the key features of our Alaska Grey tiles, including the many benefits of using them and the how-tos for installing and styling these stunning tiles.

The Details

Our Alaska tiles are the perfect addition to any bathroom, kitchen or other living space. Being so versatile, you’re granted the creative freedom to accessorise the beautiful, natural-looking patterns within this tile, to make a statement within your home.

We suggest mixing and matching these tiles to obtain a unique feature to a room, may that be as floor tiles, wall tiles or both.

Why Use Them?

Alaska Grey tiles are crafted from porcelain, known to be a liquid resistant, having a water absorption rate of less than 0.5% and are deemed one of the most durable flooring options available on the market.

You can trust that wherever they feature within your home, their strong resilience against stains and clever anti-crack properties ensure damage to the tile is extremely limited.

We believe that their useful properties paired with the stunning designs will make our Alaska tiles our next best-selling commodity.

How To Style Alaska Grey Tiles

Due to the stunning neutral tones within the Alaska Tile, the styling options of this title are endless. You can go as bold and bright as you’d like or alternatively, keep it cool. 

The above example showcases the Alaska tiles accompanied by subtle olive-toned accessories. Though we recommend these tiles with a number of other tones, from bright bold pinks to baby blues to happy yellows. The tile effortlessly compliments them all.

Tip: As the tiles have a stone-effect texture innate to their design, it’s important to choose your accessories wisely. You won’t want to go to pattern-heavy as it can convolute the room and give it a messy feel.

If you’re keen to add lots of different patterns to your home, we recommend you stick to a colour palette. This will ensure you don’t use colours that clash which can unsettle the aesthetics of the room, making it feel slightly disjointed. Take a look at the below example.

An alternative to the subtle, natural shades, is to inject a pop of colour to your room that compliments the original colour palette. See below.

By incorporating a small addition of colour to the room you can softly brighten it, making it vibrant yet inviting.

Alternatively, you can combine your new tiles with coloured grout. In keeping with the selected colour scheme shown above, we suggest using either three of the following shades of grout. These include White, Jade Green and Caramel.

Where To Use Them?

As previously mentioned, Alaska Grey tiles can be used in a variety of indoor living spaces. These include bathrooms, kitchens, conservatories, hallways and living rooms. These tiles are NOT suitable for outdoor installation and should only be used for interiors.

The durability of these tiles and versatility makes them perfect for both wall and floor tiles. Though they’re perfectly suited to either use, we find that they’re commonly used as floor tiles due to withstanding high physical impacts our floors are often subjected to.

How To Install Them

On Walls

Before you start, make sure the surface you'll be tiling on is dust free, solid and correctly prepared and primed using a quality sealant such as Mapei Primer G.

Once this has dried completely, use a good quality, cement based powder adhesive such as Mapei Keraquick, which has all the strength and water resistance you need, whether you're tiling a commercial kitchen or a shower area.

In showers and wet rooms, ensure that you achieve a full adhesive bed by not only applying the adhesive to the floor or wall but also by applying a thin layer of adhesive to the back of each tile, a process known as “back buttering”.

For grouting Alaska Grey tiles, we always recommend a colour from the extensive Mapei Ultracolour grout range which has super fine particles and helps to stop the surface of the tile from scratching.

Always remember to grout small areas at a time, usually around 1sqm, and clean up as you go to stop the grout drying to the surface of the tiles.

If you need any help at any time, consult one of our experts, who are always on hand to assist you.

On Floors

As with fixing to walls, ensure that the floor onto which the tiles are to be fixed are clean, flat, rigid and suitable to take tiles. If your concrete floor is rough, this can be smoothed to a level suitable surface using Mapei Ultraplan Renovation Screed.

Unsuitable wooden flooring made from chipboard or old floorboards can be made suitable using 6mm No More Ply cement boards.

Once your floor is suitable, fix your tiles using Mapei Keraquick, ensuring that you achieve a full adhesive bed by “back buttering” and once the adhesive is dry finish the job with Mapei Ultracolour grout.

Why Tile Giant?

We offer extremely competitive pricing on our entire range of tiles and likewise, these glazed ceramic wall tiles are both competitive for retail and trade. Our stock is widely available in our 100+ showrooms which are open to browse at your leisure.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to shop Alaska Grey tiles online, we can supply you with samples delivered for free.

Not only that but Tile Giant also offer a buyback service on any unused tiles, meaning you get value for money.