A selection of Spain’s top tile manufacturers will present their latest ideas at The Surface Design Show from 6th to 8th February at London’s Business Design Centre, Islington.  Combining beauty with technical performance, Spanish tiles draw on a rich tiling heritage, while remaining at the leading edge of contemporary design.

At the Surface Design Show, Tile of Spain, the voice of the Spanish tile industry, will curate a display of new ceramic and porcelain designs that offer an eclectic choice of colours, shapes, finishes and formats for both residential and commercial projects.

The range of looks include sumptuous monocolours, as seen in Colorker’s Metropolitain and Ceramica Elias’s Esmaltes ranges.  Visitors will also see how increasingly innovative use of colour in advanced digital printing effects is allowing manufacturers to produce realistic fabric-, metal- and wood-effect tiles, while simultaneously exploring the trend for geometrics.

Eye-catching examples include Cevica’s Good Vibes, that calls to mind a quilt of octagonal patchwork pieces; Roca’s Fabric range that evokes the warmth of tweed; and Dune’s Transverse with its design of simple diagonal lines in copper, clay, cement and graphite tones.

Dune Ceramicas draws inspiration from many sources including textiles, as seen in the Stripes Denim and Stripes Linen ranges.  Dune’s design directions also come from nature: with wood, bamboo, marble and metals all stimulating surprising compositions that look very modern and fresh.

With its micro-relief surface, the Concrete range by Ceramica Cas has a subtle geometrical design which is made out of very fine lines. There are also a number of interesting décor tiles in the collection that use the same colour palette.

Many of the tiles on display in the Tile of Spain showcase allow for a variety of settings on a wall, which gives a designer or end-user the opportunity to express fully their creativity and artistically suit materials to the space.

Individual tiles are interesting in themselves offering optical effects such as Equipe Ceramica’s Magical range in two different multi-faceted surfaces – Umbrella and Star – and El Barco’s Summit range.  Meanwhile Zirconio’s Silver collection has a variety of pleasing textures, including Tokio, Prisma and Geo.

Experimental tiles include surfaces developed for the Harmony Collection by Peronda, including the new Fading range by Japanese design studio Kuramoto that features overlapping patterns and finishes.

Also innovative is Zirconio’s Silver Prisma format which playfully uses geometry to create a gentle undulating surface of softened diagonals.  Both surfaces are visually challenging because of their sense of movement.

Manufactured in Spain and widely available in the UK, these new products embody the spirit of an industry that prides itself on proposing beautiful, meaningful and high-performance solutions to flooring, wall coverings, furnishing and external cladding.  So, if you can’t make it to Cevisama in Valencia in early February, The Surface Design Show in London will offer a great selection of top Spanish tile designs.

Tile of Spain

A new post by Joe Simpson, Diary of a Tile Addict, January 2018.