Good porcelain quality floor tiles

tallac

I'm looking to get full body porcelain floor tiles for the kitchen. I'm looking for tile sizes at least 75cm x 75cm or happy to go up to 90cm x 90cm. I'm happier to go even bigger but I think the costs get a bit crazy per square metre when you go for larger tile sizes.

As a baseline, I've seen glazed porcelain tiles as cheap as £15 per sq m (although these were 60 x 60). I've also seen full body porcelain tiles that are 80 x 80 for around £27 per sq m.

What's a reasonable starting price (per sq m cost) for fully body porcelain (excluding any really poor quality cheaper tiles that do not represent good value for money)?

tallac

Can anyone help?

Doozergirl

Hard to answer.  

When I budget for clients, I tend to set at about £40 a metre as a decent benchmark.  That seems to be the point at which the obvious dot matrix printing on ceramic starts to disappear. 

Where you buy from matters.   Porcelanosa tiles are beautiful.  Prices range from about £30 a metre upwards, but large format of the same tiles are easily double that.  Thankfully I get some significant discounts on a lot of it (they also have fairly regular sales worth waiting for).  There are other companies that do similar for less - Saloni?  But you have to find the right retailer.  Retailers pick tiles from all sorts of manufacturers and sell them as their own.  

I've had clients pick £40 a metre tiles from Topps and, with significant googling, found the exact tile elsewhere for £13.  I think it might have been Tile Mountain.  Those were ceramic, but it demonstrates how cheeky Topps can be. 

Walls and Floors are a good website. 

Tippytoes

Are you sure you really want porcelain tiles?  I had them laid in my kitchen and regret it.  I'm not particularly clumsy, but having accidentally dropped items on the floor I now have umpteen cracked and chipped tiles.  I certainly wouldn't choose this type of flooring again!

GDB2222

Tippytoes said:

Are you sure you really want porcelain tiles?  I had them laid in my kitchen and regret it.  I'm not particularly clumsy, but having accidentally dropped items on the floor I now have umpteen cracked and chipped tiles.  I certainly wouldn't choose this type of flooring again!

My DW refuses to have a tiled floor in the kitchen. She says everything breaks when dropped on it.

tallac

We've got stone tiles in the current kitchen and fairly used to anything glass breaking when dropped. It happens so infrequently though, we're not overly fussed by this. Although, I'd fully expect the glass/plate or whatever to break, I'd be surprised if the tile broke. The porcelain tiles I'm looking at are around 80cm x 80cm and they are very thick. I can't imagine them breaking from such an impact.

Emmia

We had tiles (probably 20 years old) in our kitchen prior to the refurb. They were cold underfoot, cracked, and slightly loose in places - replaced with a slate effect Amitco which is 1000x better