Nature Tiles, Bringing the Outdoors In
Written by Jennifer Heyns
When we built our house, I had no idea how much of our time would be spent in simply making decisions. We literally spent hours and days just visiting stores and trying to agree on ceramic tile for our kitchen backsplash, wood stove surround, and tub surrounds.
And the options are only expanding; manufacturers are now coming up with so much more artistic choices in tile. Maybe it’s the fact that everyone wants to be green now - closer to nature - but one company, Imagine Tile, has designed all sorts of ceramic tile with nature patterns.
These tiles are a great way to almost literally bring the outdoors inside. You have the look of Mother Nature with the feel of regular ceramic tile. One of the tiles looks like grass. Imagine enjoying your lawn inside your home - and it doesn’t even need to be seeded, weeded, fertilized, or mowed.
In addition to their grass tiles, the company also has ceramic tiles that simulate bamboo, beach sand and shells, coffee beans, fall leaves, river rocks, ocean water, leopard fur, bricks, asphalt, manhole covers, smoke, and even a crosswalk (it actually looks like asphalt with the yellow painted lines for crossing).
I’m not sure that you’d want to do an entire area or room in your home with some of these tile patterns, but they would make really interesting pathways or accents in the floor. They take whimsy to a whole new level. Imagine a playroom where the boys can race their Matchbox cars across an asphalt-looking floor or the girls can pretend to relax and catch some rays at the beach on their ceramic sand floor. The best part is that you can do all that with a floor that’s easy to keep clean (and no sand in places the sun don’t shine).
The tiles could really add a conversation piece to your house and give you something to smile at when you come home. In fact the grass tiles have such a cultured lawn look, I may try to talk my husband into installing them outside - it’d be easier than getting him to fix the mower!
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