During Coverings 2022, Ryan Fasan presented a synopsis of current tile trends to an audience at Tile of Spain’s booth. Among the points Fasan emphasized was color. “If you look at all of the paint trends and look at the stands around us, they echo what is going on in Sherman Williams and Benjamin Moore’s forecasts,” he said. “We started to see largely very soft, but tinted -- almost filtered neutrals -- that have a hint of blue and green. That was about 70% of the forecast in colors, but 30% were really rich and saturated tones, although still quite neutral. You get a lot of deep gray greens and deep gray saturated blues. This is a lot of the color palette we are looking at, and it speaks very well to tile.” 

Fasan said he wanted to highlight how color is used very differently in spaces today. “We have some key ways of how we are incorporating color into our spaces,” he said. “Material like tile will outlast most of the residences in the spaces we are putting it in. We have to be very strategic in how we are using our color. Seeing it done in design, a foil is against a white background or a neutral cream-colored background. It’s that punch – that kind of exclamation point that draws your eye to the space. In terms of saturation, we are either going very saturated or very de-saturated. We rarely play with both unless we need that foil aspect – that punctuation.” 

Moreover, a great deal of attention is being given to temperature, according to Fasan. “We are seeing spaces that are either really cool or really warm,” he said. “We tend not to mix a cool gamut with a warm gamut as much, unless we are going for that eye-catching pop.” 

Another factor to consider about hues of tile is its surface finish, Fasan explained. “That’s really important because that tells how it will read for a client moving through a space,” he said. “When we want the color to always read as the color that it is, we go with a hyper matte finish. If we want it to be dynamic and respond to the time of day or the lighting characteristics around the space, we change the finish and increase the gloss level because then it becomes more and more perspective driven in terms of how the color reads.”