Marble Pattern Floors

Bathrooms evolve but black-and-white marble pattern floors endure.

Next time we talk about change in the way we live at home think about this: checkerboard floors have been used continually now for four hundred years. While bathrooms have evolved, the black-and-white checkerboard floors in honed or polished marble endures, even in a bath as countrified as a delicate white one [top] with wainscot, vintage tub, antique style sink vanity and tiles set simply, on the diagonal,  a solid black border around the perimeter.

Exaggeration you say? Consider this Jan Steen Dutch genre painting titled “The Morning Toilet(te) 2,” painted around 1665.

A second traditionally appointed bath, with elaborate woodwork and antique-style vanity, runs diagonally-set tile right to the walls with cut halves dying into the baseboard. Here the border is flipped into the center to form a decorative, 4-square medallion framed by a two slim variegated dot borders – as if two pairs of tiles are a picture set into a solid black frame.

Tumbled marble field tiles set diagonally on the walls becomes a third color for a lively floor design that uses black and white squares for a border. The more intricately set diagonal tiles with pinwheels in the center are arranged much like bathroom rugs. A similar motif repeats in the etched window that separates the commode area from the main bathroom. Ebonized woodwork helps reinforce the color scheme of a wonderfully detailed high-end bathroom floor design.

(Source: House Beautiful, rijksmuseum, Trad Home, Kitchen and Bath Ideas)

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