Fully tiled bathrooms - pros and cons

[MariaDingbat]

Our new house has two fully tiled bathroom (main and ensuite) and I think the tiles are dreadful. The family bathroom is poo brown with a brown flock shiny pattern and beige floor and the ensuite is white with small black circles and black with big black shiny circles. My instinct is to rip out all the tiles and only have a small amount of replacement tiles where needed for waterproofing. However, my head says that's too expensive. Should we retile the whole walls? Poster them and only retile small areas? Paint the existing tiles? They rooms were done at most 10 years ago.

Just had our small bathroom fully tiled. Looks great and so easy to clean. It gets a bit damp easily so easiest option for us and looks fab.
It was fully tiled previously but the ceiling was painted and got a bit mouldy/damp.

@TizerorFizz

I have similar in one bathroom. But I was really meaning the shower panels. Tongue and groove isn’t quite the same. (Did you want your soil pipe quite so obvious?)

No! We knocked a wall out between 2 bathrooms (there's an en-suite behind the far wall) and discovered the soil pipe and it literally had been hidden between the 2 walls, and we had no alternative but to box around it. I usually stack towels on it to hide it a bit! lol.

Original old peachy effort - mid work, took out landing cupboard - final look. Still working on it, more plants now in, inc. 5ft triffid behind the bath!, and on the wall which you can't see there are no tiles, and we are waiting for our cabinets to be delivered. Temp sink there at the mo.

En-suite still not quite finished yet either, as waiting for the cabinets, but again, now only half tiled.

@MariaDingbat

Thanks for the help everyone, I think my personal preference is for half tiled but I've realised I can't justify ripping out the existing tiles just because i don't like them as they're in great condition, as are the bathroom suites. So i may have to suck it up and live with them for a few years. Here's a photo of the family bathroom, there are no windows and you can't really see the glazed brown flock pattern on the tiles, but it's there. Who knows, it may have been someone's dream bathroom once 🤣

It reminds me of the bathrooms in Italian /French Mediterranean hotels about 20 years ago. In a way I quite like it because it reminds me of going on hot sunny holidays!

My house has two fully tiled (not by me) bathrooms and I don’t like it. It doesn’t look very… interesting. Soulless maybe.

The fully tiled bathrooms in our house are now looking quite dated. Preferred part tiled as you can then change the colour scheme. Also if you need to change shower/cabinets etc you end up with unsightly holes in the tiles to disguise

@MariaDingbat

Thanks for the info all. I hadn't thought about damp or wall strength. I've never had to deal with fully tiled walls before, how do put up pictures or cupboards or shelves? Just drill though the tiles?

We have full height white lightweight ceramic tiles fixed onto waterproof plasterboard. We drilled through the tiles to hang a wall cupboard and the holder for the bath mixer shampoo spray. But a metal soap dish, metal towel holders and loo roll holder are all fixed to the tiles using the silicone method, ie not screwed on. In 4 years, none of them have fallen off or pulled the tiles off.

If you look at the fantastic bathroom tiles sold by Porcelanosa they don’t date. It is small format tiles with too much grout that date in my view. Larger tiles in neutral colours will generally look good. They need to be textured or have interesting glazes. Their tiles don’t cost a fortune but they are wonderful and they last. The size of the bathroom and how much light it has is also critical from a design point of view.