Clearance stone and marble look tiles
Stone and marble look tiles manufactured in porcelain or ceramic. Long-lasting and low-maintenance, with the look of beautiful natural stone. If it's actual quarried natural stone you're after, check our Natural Stone section.
Buying stone and marble look tiles: what actually matters
Look-alike or the real thing? They behave completely differently
A marble or stone-look porcelain or ceramic tile has been printed with a pattern. It does not etch, it does not stain from a spilled glass of wine, it needs no sealing, and it will outlast real marble in a kitchen by decades. Real marble is porous, reacts to anything acidic, and needs sealing and resealing. Porcelain is the right answer for almost every domestic floor. Real stone is the right answer when you want the depth and variation that printing still cannot quite reach, and you are prepared to maintain it.
No two batches are exactly the same shade
Tiles are fired in batches and no two batches are exactly the same shade. The difference is usually invisible in the box and obvious across a finished floor in daylight. Where a supplier has told us how many batches make up a line, the product page says so, and it says how big the largest single batch is: that is the largest area you can lay with no shade variation at all. Where they have not told us, the page says nothing rather than guessing. If you are laying one continuous floor, buy within one batch or accept that you are mixing, and if you are mixing, open several boxes at once and lay from all of them rather than box by box, so any variation reads as texture instead of a seam.
How much to over-order, and why 10% is usually the wrong number
Ten per cent is the figure everyone repeats and it is only right for a simple rectangular room laid square with a large format tile. Straight lay in a plain room runs closer to 7 to 10%. A diagonal or herringbone lay wastes far more on the perimeter cuts, so 15 to 20% is realistic. Small formats and mosaics waste more again as a proportion. Rooms with lots of edges, a hob, a niche, a stepped floor, push it up. Because this stock does not come back, round up to the next whole box and then add one more: a spare box costs less than the tile and stops a single cracked tile in year three becoming a whole new floor.
Why this stock is such good value
Clearance tiles are not seconds. Everything here is first grade. It is cheap because it is finite: a line an importer is clearing, a colourway a manufacturer has stopped making, or the tail of a container that nobody wants to keep warehousing. The catch is not quality, it is that you cannot get more. On a normal tile you can go back in six weeks for another two boxes. Here you cannot, so the quantity you order is the quantity you will ever have.