Indoors – Outdoors
Living
Tiling our outdoor living areas such as patios, balconies and courtyards has never been more popular.
Long gone are the days of random crazy paving, or slabs that look like they were left over from a council paving scheme – nowadays it’s all about style and elegance, and bringing the indoors out by using a matching tile from indoor living areas through to the outside.
Using ‘indoor’ tiles outdoors has been slowly building momentum over the last couple of decades, since the tile manufacturers began to use porcelain instead of ceramic. Since then the advances in manufacturing technology have seen a huge leap forward in the sizes, styles and designs that are available and suitable for use outdoors.
Until only a few years ago the tiles were generally made to a thickness of 10mm. A 10mm tile is perfectly suitable for use on a solid substrate – which meant having to have a concrete slab poured in the area to be tiled, and then left for up to 3 months for it to cure properly before tiling – but no good for tiling onto raised pedestals or laying loose onto a compacted bed of aggregate, which in turn offers a lot more freedom of where tiles can be fitted outdoors.
Recognising this trend, the industry reacted by making tiles thicker and stronger specifically for use outdoors. Twice as thick in fact. Most factories now offer 20mm thick tiles that can be used pretty much anywhere as long as the substrate isn’t too ‘wobbly’. Think about laying them straight onto a compressed aggregate with no adhesive required, or loose laid onto a lawn to provide a quick and stylised path solution. All of our 20mm tiles are also suitable for use with the pedestal systems now in production which means you can easily accommodate uneven substrates, or leave a maintenance gap to run services underneath with no special preparation at all.
Outdoor spaces have never looked so good!