Tile Designs for Countertops

"I’m Lee. I have a degree in architecture and about ten years in the construction field and today we’re doing a fairly ornate countertop in my own house. Both of the countertops are using the basic same colors, but it’s a different tile type or texture. What this all started with was wanting one diamond tile in the middle of each part of the counter top. Once you have this one tile centered, I have a sixteen inch tile cut out in Plexiglas laid over it and this little edging is going to become your border, which you can see on the counter in the back. And then, alternating with grey, and then red, and then the diamond shapes. And these diamond shapes are going to wrap around this part of the counter top. So you will cut it right there and this part will go here and this part will go here.

And in front of the sink, we’ll have this same tile- this slate- which will go across the floor and go up the back of the wall on the back counter, which is also going to go up the wall behind the sinks in both bathrooms also. This is going to be laid down on quarter inch spacers, and it’s actually a lot easier than you think it is, because you wrap all the tiles around everything. So you don’t have to cut a tile and decide what you’re going to do here- you just wrap everything around. It will even be wrapped around the edge here.

This is where we started the design at. And what we did is we just centered two tiles at a diamond angle, more or less. And then I wanted to put a border around those two so that those are just two spots that you see as soon as you glance at the countertop. And so we made a fourteen by fourteen cut out of Plexiglas that we can lay over this and center everything off of. Everything is off of these four sides right here. You work inward and get all of your spacing and you work outward to get all of your spacing. And that’s how you would lay out an ornate, or a diagonal countertop."