Victorian Floor Tile Colour Samples

Samples are charged per tile — the price shown against each colourway — plus postage. When you go on to place a tile order over £50, we refund the postage you paid on your samples. So order as many colourways as you genuinely need to make the decision: on a floor you will live with for decades, the cost of sampling properly comes back to you the moment you order the tiles.

A single loose tile in the plain square format, in the colourway you select — the real body-coloured tile from the range, not a printed swatch or a photograph. That matters with these floors, because the colour goes through the tile rather than sitting on a surface glaze, and a matt vitrified body reflects light quite differently from anything printed on paper. Select a colourway from the list above and add each one you want to compare.

All eighteen in the range: White, Dover White, Chester Mews, Holkham Dune, Old London, Buff, Regency Bath, Brown, Red, Green, Blue, Grey, Pugin Blue, Revival Grey, Black, Carnation Pink, Hawthorn Yellow and Spring Green. Not every colour is made in every shape, so if you have a particular pattern in mind it is worth checking the format you need before ordering — call 01344 620211 and we will confirm it.

More than you think. A Victorian geometric floor is built from several colours at once — a ground, a contrast, and usually one or two accents in the border — and the combination is what you are really choosing, not the individual tiles. Lay the samples out together on the floor of the actual room, in daylight and again in the evening, before you commit. If you are matching an existing original floor, order the closest three or four candidates rather than one.

Very closely, but a body-coloured ceramic is a fired natural product and there is slight variation between production batches. Order the whole floor at once, including your cutting allowance, and mix tiles from several boxes as you set out rather than working box by box. If you are extending or repairing an existing floor, send us a photograph and tell us roughly when it was laid, and we will give you an honest view of how close a current batch will be.

Yes — the range is specified for interior and exterior walls and floors, which is exactly why these tiles were used for Victorian front paths, porches and doorsteps as well as hallways. That is unusual and genuinely useful: you can run the same floor from the garden path, through the porch and into the hall without a change of material. Exterior work needs the right substrate, falls and a frost-resistant adhesive and grout, so talk it through with us or your tiler first.

It depends on the format, and the guidance in the range is not uniform — some shapes and sizes are specified as requiring a sealer and others are not. As a rule we recommend sealing any Victorian floor before grouting and again once the grout has cured, particularly in a hallway, a porch or anywhere exposed to weather: it keeps grout haze off the face and makes the floor far easier to live with. Check the individual tile page for the format you are buying, or call 01344 620211 and we will tell you exactly what your tiles need.

Squares at 151 x 151mm and 75 x 75mm, triangles at 149 x 106 x 106mm and 73 x 52 x 52mm, rectangles at 151 x 24mm, and step treads at 151 x 75mm — all 9mm thick, matt, and sold per tile. Those pieces are what let a geometric floor be drawn rather than simply laid: squares for the field, triangles to turn a border on the diagonal, and thin rectangles to draw the lines between. Sample the colours first, then we will help you work out the counts for your pattern.