A Petal Mosaic Porch Floor in Dover, MA (Loose Pieces, Set by Hand, No Spacers)

This is the same house in Dover, MA where we are doing the chevron master shower. It is a whole-house tile job, and one part of it is three three-season porches that all get the same floor. This post is about the first one: a petal mosaic porch floor in Dover MA, 265 square feet, set one loose piece at a time. In 25 years of tile work, a floor like this does not come across very often.

The job

A three-season porch is a room people use most of the year, so the floor has to look like a real floor and hold up like one. The walls on this porch are getting siding, and the space is meant to be a place to hang out in every season.

The tile is Natucer’s Colonial series, an extruded porcelain made in Spain and rated frost resistant, in the Cotto color. The pattern is built from two shapes. Each module is two Colonial Petal pieces, 20 by 8 centimeters (about 8 by 3 inches), plus one Colonial Kite, 16.5 by 16.5 centimeters (about 6.5 by 6.5 inches). Two petals and a kite make one module, and the modules lock together into interlocking circles across the floor. In the United States it comes through Soho Studio, where you will see it listed as Chamartin Peach Terracotta Kite 6×6 and Petal 3×8.

What we ran into

The number of pieces. Every petal and every kite is its own piece, set one at a time, and 265 square feet of them adds up to a very large number of individual pieces going down by hand.

That changes the whole job. With a regular square or rectangular tile, you snap your lines, drop in spacers and the joint takes care of itself. A petal has curved edges on both sides and a kite has four points, so there is no spacer made for either one. The joint between every piece is decided by the hands setting it, every single time. If it opens up a little on one side of the porch and tightens on the other, the circles stop reading as circles. The pattern only works when the spacing is the same across the entire floor.

How we handled the petal mosaic porch floor in Dover MA

Prep first. The porch floor got an uncoupling membrane before any tile went down. A three-season porch sees bigger temperature swings than the inside of the house, and the structure under it moves with those swings. The membrane sits between the subfloor and the tile and lets the two move independently, so that movement does not telegraph into cracked tile or cracked grout. On a floor made of this many individual pieces, that layer matters even more.

Then the setting. No spacers. The crew kept the joint by eye, piece by piece, holding the same gap between every petal and every kite from one end of the porch to the other. That only works when the people doing it have set enough tile that the spacing lives in their hands, and when everybody on the floor is holding the same joint. It is slower than a regular floor. It is the only way to do this material right.

Everybody on site was looking forward to seeing this floor go in. A pattern like this is a lot of work, and it is also the kind of job a tile setter waits for.

Here is a short clip from the install:

Grout is Laticrete Parchment. This porch took four bags, which gives you an idea of how much joint there is in a floor built from this many pieces. The door gets a wood threshold at the transition.

The result

One porch down, 265 square feet of interlocking circles with the joint holding the same from wall to wall, in a warm cotto color that fits a porch. The other two porches in the house get the same floor, and now the crew has the rhythm for it. If you are following the rest of this house, the master shower is the one in chevron tile direction: up or down.

If you are considering a shaped tile like this

Ask one question before you buy it: how will the installer keep the spacing even across the whole room when no spacer fits the shape? The real answer is experience. Ask to see a floor they have done with a shaped tile, not just squares and rectangles. You can also check for a Certified Tile Installer through the Ceramic Tile Education Foundation.

A petal mosaic porch floor in Dover MA gets the same prep and the same care as every floor tile installation we do. If you are in Dover and have a porch, a mudroom or a floor with a pattern you have not seen installed before, I am happy to look at it.