How to choose kitchen tiles: splashbacks, floors and feature walls

A kitchen contains three different tile briefs in one room, and treating them as a single decision is how good kitchens end up looking confused. The splashback is at eye level, visible from anywhere in the room, and sets the design tone of the whole space. The floor is a high-traffic, high-soiling work surface that has to be cleanable and forgiving. The feature wall, if there is one, answers to the architecture rather than the joinery.

Each brief has its own logic. Specify them together so they read as one room, but specify them separately so each one does its job.

The splashback brief

The splashback is the design statement. It's at eye level, lit from above by the rangehood and from the front by pendants, and it's visible from the dining table, the living room and the front door in any open-plan layout. Whatever you put behind the cooktop is what visitors will remember about the kitchen.

Height matters. A 600mm splashback (bench to overhead cabinet) is the budget default. Bench-to-rangehood is the most common contemporary spec. Bench-to-ceiling is the premium move and works particularly well with handmade tiles like zellige, where the variation rewards the larger surface area.

The dominant 2026 styles: zellige, the handmade Moroccan ceramic with visible glaze pooling and edge variation — the character choice. Subway, the timeless default that survives every cycle. Marble-look porcelain slab, near-seamless and luxe with very low maintenance. And large-format slab in stone, concrete or terrazzo looks for the contemporary, gallery-walled aesthetic.

One non-negotiable: the National Construction Code requires non-combustible material immediately behind a gas cooktop. All ceramic and porcelain tiles satisfy this requirement. Glass and stone do too. Timber-look anything does not.

The floor brief

Kitchen floors take more abuse than any other floor in the house. Dropped knives, spilled oil, ground-in food, water from the dishwasher, foot traffic from breakfast through to dinner. PEI 4 is the minimum abrasion rating for residential kitchen floors — high traffic with grit.

Matte or textured finishes give the grip you want, especially in the wet zone around the sink and dishwasher. Polished tiles look beautiful in a showroom and become a hazard the first time someone drops an ice cube.

Format is a maintenance question. Large-format tiles (600×600 and above) have fewer grout joints and are dramatically easier to keep clean. Small-format tiles produce a lot of grout, and grout in a kitchen is the part that ages worst. If you're using a smaller format on a kitchen floor, specify epoxy grout or accept that you'll be regrouting in five years.

The feature wall brief

If the kitchen has a dedicated feature wall — usually behind a freestanding range, or framing an open-plan dining zone — treat it like the living-room feature wall spec rather than another kitchen surface. The materials that work here are zellige, large-format stone-look slab, or a deliberately contrasting material to the splashback. The feature wall is where the kitchen talks to the rest of the open-plan room. It should answer to that, not to the joinery.

Grout for kitchens

Behind the cooktop, specify a polymer-modified grout — it resists oil, steam and the daily cycle of heat and humidity. Standard cement grout will eventually stain and crack in this zone.

In the rest of the kitchen, standard cement grout is fine if sealed properly. The mistake most people make is leaving grout colour as an afterthought. Tone-matched grout reads as a single calm surface; contrast grout reads as a graphic pattern. Both can work — but the choice should be deliberate, made at the time you choose the tile, not delegated to the tiler on installation day.

Style guide: the four most-specified kitchen tile looks

Zellige splashback with a honed stone-look porcelain floor. Handmade character above, calm understated floor below.

Subway splashback with a concrete-look floor. The contemporary classic — the splashback does the timeless work, the floor does the modern work.

Marble-look slab splashback with a timber-look porcelain floor. Luxe and warm, the show-home spec.

Mosaic or hexagon splashback with a large-format floor. Pattern above, simplicity below.

Frequently asked questions