ByLydia Geisel,Photography byMatt Kisiday
PublishedAug 30, 2024 1:45 AM EDT
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WhenEliza Silvahears the wordsmosaic tile,she doesn’t picture the usual suspects (a Hilton Garden Inn bathroom, a McMansion kitchen’s beige-brown backsplash). Instead, she thinks about Rome. Specifically the four months she lived there studying design and poking around places like the Baths of Caracalla, where the floors are swathed in mesmerizing mosaic tile. “Since then, it’s been in the back of my head as an ideal material for a luxury spa,” says Silva.
So when she and her husband, David—together they own a restaurant calledGalley Beach—were building their dream home in Nantucket in 2020, Silva ordered 600 square feet of mosaic green onyx tile for their bathroom. That worked out to roughly 1,500 12-by-12-inch sheets. Her plan? Drench the floors and walls in the stuff. The end result is absolutely mesmerizing.
But like any tile style, mosaic onyx has its downsides. For starters, going the real-stone route is pricey, even when it’s chopped into tiny squares. And though Silva worked through an individual supplier rather than a showroom, her order came with a 12-month lead time. When it finally did arrive, it looked nothing like she’d imagined. “We started unpacking it and quickly realized the tile had come from three different stone lots,” she recalls. “We started putting them together, side by side, and none of them matched. It wasn’t looking seamless.” Panic duly set in.
Silva sorted out a new order, randomly blending the shades of green so they’d look cohesive. And when her original installer walked off the job because the sheets wouldn’t lock together, she took on that role, too. “I physically slammed them together, with stone spreading everywhere, cutting my arms and everything,” she shares. The designer planned out each wall to a T, even factoring in how sunlight hit each surface. “There are a couple random sheets that didn’t get sorted properly that I can see every once in a while, but it actually worked out perfectly fine,” she says.
Still, the pros outweighed the cons. For one, the mosaic sheets lock together so tightly that the job required little grout—and super-dark, thick grout lines can get distracting, says Silva. Psst: fewer grout lines also means it’s easier to keep the bathroom clean. Win-win.
While she initially considered a green onyx slab for the vanity countertop too, she’d learned the hard way that the material’s color is wildly unpredictable. So she went with a honey hue instead. Silva was also careful with her other finishes, choosing modern Waterworks plumbing fixtures that wouldn’t fight the rest of the space. A plain white tub could have made the mosaic tile look dated and cheesy, so she sourced a clay basin that looks like it came straight out of the Roman baths.
Here are some equally dreamy green mosaic tile designs worthy of every wall in your bathroom.
Lydia Geisel has been stirring the creative pot at Domino since 2017. She writes and edits her way through home tours and design stories like it's a competitive sport. She lives in Brooklyn—because of course she does.
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