Adding Style To Your Home With Border Tiles

If you like the idea of adding some extra detail to the design of your wall or floor tiles, then decorative borders are worth some serious consideration. You can improve on the overall effect of many designs around your home with borders, and they can be created in a number of interesting ways.

The Benefits of a Border

Windows, backsplashes or foyers are all popular places in the home to have a tiled design and border tiles can be a perfect finishing touch to this; they can add style, detail and colour.

Borders can be fitted at wainscot height and run around a shower room or they can be fitted above the worktop around a kitchen. All in all, tiled borders are a subtle way of adding personality to a room and they will inject a little detail into an otherwise bland and uninteresting area of your home.

Choosing a Type of Tile

Tiled borders are available in several different materials, sizes and designs. Exactly which one you choose and how you decide to use it will be entirely down to you. Here are a just few interesting possibilities -

Using netted, mosaic tiles (usually made from glass, ceramic or stone).

Mixing more than one material in your design, i.e. wood, glass, porcelain, stone or ceramic.

Cutting-down decorative hand-painted wall tiles to create an attractive border.

Some Stylish Ways of Using Border-Sized Tiles

Border-sized tiles can be used in a variety of ways that will really enhance the decor of your home; and you don't just have to stick to conventional methods either!

Here are a few interesting ways to use border tiles -

Adding Tiles to a Hardwood Floor

Hardwood flooring looks great as it is, but stone or terracotta inlays will give it a real look of class! Some suppliers will even have ready-made borders that incorporate stone, terracotta and hardwood all in one design.

Adding to an Existing design

Anyone with a mosaic tile rug on their bathroom floor can further enhance this by using a matching border on the wall/s. Basket-weaves, targets and hexagons are all popular designs in tiles and these can all be found in a border format. Many existing tiled designs can be added to with a bit of careful thought.

Extra Decoration in Your Kitchen

If you are planning on tiling the backsplash in your kitchen, then why not consider incorporating a border into your design? Fitting a tiled border to where your worktop meets the wall will add a real touch of style to your cooking area and it will often give a more spacious feel to your kitchen.

Attention Seeking

Decorative tiled borders are a great way of drawing attention to certain parts of your home. So, if you have a particular fondness for something in one of your rooms, you can really make it stand out. Why not fix a mosaic border around the edges of your fire surround? Or how about adding a sunshine design to the centre of your conservatory floor? There are bound to be areas of your property that will benefit from an extra creative touch!

Patterns and Borders

Some people will use the same design of tile in several of their rooms, but fit it in a variety of ways. For example, tiles can be run in straight rows through a kitchen yet be laid diagonally across a hallway.
And these different methods can be made even more interesting by introducing border tiles into the design!

Creating Your Own Border-Sized Tiles

As you can see, there are many ways to use border-sized tiles around your home! However, when push comes to shove, many of us will find the cost of these tiles a little steep. But fear not; there is actually a very simple way of getting around this problem...

Instead of paying over the odds for tiles specifically designed for creating borders, you can easily make your own! If you purchase a few sheets of mosaic tiles (glass, ceramic or polished marble), then you can turn them into your very own border-sized widths. Mosaic tile sheets are only held together with netting and this can easily be cut to the desired width with a knife or a pair of sharp scissors!