The showroom sells you a look under showroom lighting. The floor has to survive monsoon humidity, a daily wet mop and twenty years of furniture being dragged across it. Here is how the choice actually plays out.
Tile selection is the one decision in a renovation that owners genuinely enjoy and contractors quietly dread, because the criteria used in a showroom - how it looks, under bright light, dry, on a vertical display - have very little to do with how a floor performs in a Mumbai flat five years later.
The four options, in practice
- Full-body vitrified: the colour runs through the whole thickness, so a chip or a deep scratch does not show a pale core. The most forgiving choice for a floor that will take real use, though the design range is narrower.
- Glazed vitrified (GVT and double-charge): a printed and glazed surface over a vitrified body. This is where the marble-look and wood-look finishes live, and the quality range within it is enormous. A chip in the glaze shows.
- Ceramic: higher water absorption and a softer body. Perfectly reasonable on walls and in low-traffic areas, and generally the wrong choice for a main floor that will be wet-mopped daily.
- Natural stone: marble, granite and kota. Real depth and character, and real maintenance - marble is porous and reacts to acids, so lemon, toilet cleaner and even some floor cleaners leave permanent dull marks unless it is sealed and treated with care.
The one specification worth reading on the box is water absorption. A porcelain or vitrified tile absorbs very little - the standards put the porcelain threshold at half a per cent - while ceramic bodies absorb considerably more. In a city that runs at high humidity for four months and where floors are wet-mopped daily, that number is not academic.
Where the Mumbai climate decides it for you
- High-gloss floors show every smear from a wet mop, and they show it worst in exactly the humid months when the mop comes out most often.
- Gloss is also slippery wet. In a bathroom, a balcony, a kitchen or the strip of floor just inside the front door during monsoon, that is a genuine safety question, not a styling one.
- Anything on a balcony or an open terrace lives outdoors. It needs a body that will not take up water, and a surface that stays grippy under standing water and direct sun.
- Marble in a Mumbai kitchen will meet turmeric, lemon and tomato within the first week. Granite or a good vitrified tile is the calmer choice for a working kitchen floor.
The straightforward rule we work to: matt or textured anti-skid in every wet area and every outdoor-facing area, and whatever you like in the dry rooms.
Size, and why bigger is not automatically better
Large-format tiles look excellent in a photograph of a large room. In a real flat there are three consequences to weigh.
- They demand a much flatter substrate. Any unevenness that a smaller tile would absorb across several joints shows up on a large tile as lippage - a raised edge you can feel with a bare foot.
- They need full coverage under the whole tile, back-buttered as well as bedded. Laid on corner dabs, a large tile sits over a void, and voids are where tiles crack and sound hollow.
- In small Mumbai rooms they generate more waste, because a large tile cut to fit a 6 ft dimension leaves an offcut too big to be useful and too small to use.
None of that is an argument against large formats. It is an argument for pricing them honestly, because the labour and the wastage move as well as the material rate.
The things that decide the floor more than the tile does
A mid-range tile laid well will outlast and outlook a premium tile laid badly, every time. What actually determines the result:
- A full bed of adhesive or mortar under the whole tile rather than dabs at the corners, so no tile sits over a hollow
- Setting out from a struck line, with the layout planned so cuts land where furniture and doorways hide them rather than in the middle of the room
- One shade lot for the whole area, checked on delivery - two batches of the same tile code can differ visibly, and you will only see it once the floor is down
- Falls in every wet area running to the outlet, checked with water and not with an eye
- Consistent joint width with a proper spacer, and grout chosen for the location rather than whatever is on the van
- Levels carried correctly between rooms, so thresholds do not become a trip edge
A workable specification for a Mumbai flat
- Living room and bedrooms: full-body or good-quality glazed vitrified, matt or satin rather than high gloss
- Kitchen floor: matt vitrified with slip resistance; granite counter over marble in a working kitchen
- Bathrooms: anti-skid floor tile with a proper fall, and a larger wall tile above it
- Balcony and utility: textured anti-skid rated for outdoor use
- Entrance and lobby: something that will not turn into a skating rink when monsoon feet walk in on it
Chamunda Constructions lays tiling and flooring across complete building projects and individual flats, and we will happily go through a shortlist with you before it is ordered - the cheapest time to change a tile decision is always before the pallet arrives on site.