By Liam Ouanounou
For most of the last fifteen years, "safe bathroom choice" and "3x6 white subway tile" were basically the same phrase at our Myrtle Avenue showroom. It's cheap to install, it never looks wrong, and it resells well — which is exactly why so many bathrooms in Brooklyn and beyond ended up looking the same. That's shifting. More homeowners are walking in asking for pattern: encaustic-look florals on a floor, a color-blocked accent wall, a bold geometric that turns a five-by-eight bathroom into the most interesting room in the house. Subway tile isn't gone, but it's no longer the default it used to be.
Why pattern is winning now
Two things changed at once. First, the manufacturing caught up — printed porcelain can now replicate a hand-painted encaustic cement tile's pattern with far more color and detail than earlier tile printing allowed, without cement tile's sealing and staining headaches. Second, homeowners doing a bathroom renovation increasingly see it as the one room in the house where a bold choice doesn't have to commit them to anything else. A patterned bathroom floor doesn't need to match a kitchen, a living room, or resale-minded neutrals the way a more visible room might. It's a contained risk, which makes it an easier one to take.
The National Kitchen & Bath Association has tracked this shift in its own design trend surveys, noting bathrooms specifically as the room where designers report clients most willing to experiment with pattern and saturated color — more than kitchens, more than living spaces. That tracks with what we're seeing across our own sample library: pattern requests for bathroom floors and accent walls have become a routine part of a showroom visit rather than an occasional one.
Where pattern is actually landing
It's rarely a whole room. The requests we get most often follow a few consistent patterns of their own:
Floors, walls stay quiet. An encaustic-look porcelain floor paired with a plain field tile on the walls — the classic pairing, and still the most requested one, because it lets the pattern do all the work without competing with tile on three other surfaces.
A single accent wall, usually behind the vanity. This has become the more common move in smaller powder rooms and primary bathrooms alike, since it delivers the visual impact of a patterned room at a fraction of the material cost and without covering a shower surround in a busy print that's harder to keep looking clean.
Color-blocked walls instead of printed pattern. Not every bold bathroom uses a printed motif — some homeowners are pairing two or three solid, saturated glossy tiles in a deliberate block pattern instead, which reads as just as much of a departure from plain subway tile without relying on a repeating print. This is where most of our bathroom pattern conversations actually end up, and it's the route we'd point you at first.
Our Small collection from La Fabrica is built for it: twelve glossy colorways — Emerald, Navy, Prussian, Flamingo, Ocher, Prune and Sage alongside the quieter Beige, Grey, Black and White — in four compact formats, including a 4x4 square and a 4.9x4.2 hexagon. The range is the point. Twelve colors in one body and one glaze finish means a two- or three-color block reads as a deliberate composition rather than a mismatch, because every piece was made to sit next to every other. It's also a genuinely small format, so a block pattern gets enough repeats to register across a wall the size of a Brooklyn bathroom rather than resolving into three big rectangles.
For the printed-pattern route specifically, our Ispale and Seville lines — both from APE Grupo, one of our Spanish factory partners — are what we pull when someone says they want something "handmade-looking." Spanish ceramic manufacturers have leaned into artisanal, hand-finished pattern work in a way that's distinct from the cleaner, more uniform look of a lot of Italian porcelain, and it's a genuine point of difference when a client wants texture and irregularity built into the glaze itself rather than a flat, repeating print. Both lines are in the showroom now and we're still photographing them for the site, so the samples are worth seeing in person — ask us and we'll pull them.
The mistake worth avoiding
Pattern dates faster than a plain field tile, and that's the trade-off worth being honest about before committing. A bathroom is one of the more expensive rooms in a house to retile — it's not a paint color you can redo in a weekend — so a pattern chosen purely because it's trending this year is a real risk if the plan is to stay in the house for a decade or more. The homeowners who get the most life out of a bold bathroom tend to pick a pattern with some restraint in its palette (two or three tones rather than five) or one rooted in a longer-running style — encaustic geometric patterns, for instance, have a couple hundred years of precedent behind them rather than a single design cycle — so it reads intentional rather than dated once the trend cycle moves on.
It's also worth thinking about scale before falling for a sample chip, the same way we'd tell anyone shopping terrazzo or a large-format slab: a busy four-inch swatch can look overwhelming in your hand and settle down once it's tiled across an actual floor, or the reverse. And whatever pattern you land on for a bathroom floor, make sure it's rated for the job — we go into how that works in our PEI ratings piece, and a patterned porcelain floor should carry the same PEI 2-3 minimum as any other bathroom floor, regardless of how good it looks in the showroom.
Bringing it into your project
If subway tile feels like the safe choice you're picking by default rather than the one you actually want, it's worth spending twenty minutes with a pattern before ruling it out. Order samples of a few options at real size, or stop by the showroom at 743 Myrtle Avenue and we'll pull pattern and color-blocked options against whatever fixtures and vanity you're already working with — pattern reads completely differently next to your actual tile plan than it does on a phone screen.