Product · MBYSZ

Flexible Art Tile

A 1200 × 600 mm sheet, 4 mm thick, printed one small tile at a time. The joints are pressed into the face rather than drawn onto it, so the wall reads as tiling from across the room and as a thin sheet in your hand. More than 10 patterns.

Request a sampleSee the patternsColour card (PDF)

Art tile is the one product in the range that is printed rather than quarried. The base is the same MCM sheet we make for the stone series — clay and colour sand, formed at low temperature, no resin binder and no firing. What changes is the face: in place of a stone surface there is a brick-bond layout of small tiles, each one printed separately, with a joint between them.

Printed tile usually gives itself away in one of two places. The joint is a flat grey line sitting on the same plane as the tile, and it vanishes the moment light rakes across the wall. Or the pattern repeats every few tiles and never quite meets the sheet beside it. Neither happens here, for the reason in the middle of this page.

The patterns

One size, one layout. Ten are photographed here; the list runs longer, and samples of any three are free.

The joint is a shadow, not a line

Most printed brick tile is one flat photograph of a tiled wall. Run your finger over the grout and there is nothing to feel — the line is grey pixels on the same plane as the tile face, and a raking light wipes it out completely.

Here each small tile is printed on its own and placed by a vision system rather than a fixed repeat, so the print registers tile by tile instead of sheet by sheet. The joint between them is pressed into the surface, not printed on it. That pressed recess holds a shadow line, and the shadow is what your eye actually reads as depth. It is also why the wall still works at two metres and not just at twenty.

Look at the corner of the pattern where a tile turns: the layout is continuous, because the registration is per tile. Nothing was mirrored to fill the sheet.

Brick Red, joint detail at 1:1

Four millimetres, so it bends

The sheet goes around a column, into a coved corner and over a curved reception face without a kerf, a mesh or a tiler. One pair of hands can carry a whole wall’s worth up a stairwell.

A utility knife cuts it against a straight edge; openings take a jigsaw with a carbide blade, on a board and never on the floor. A chipped edge cannot be sanded out, so slow is faster here.

Behind it, the wall only has to be flat, dry and sound. Where a thin brick veneer would want a ledge, a mesh and a mason, this wants a notched trowel and a clean wall.

Brick Red, rolled by hand

Behind a shelf, on a wall already built

This is Lime behind timber shelving. The wall was finished, the cabinets were in, and the sheet still went up without stripping anything back to block or bringing a wet trade into the room. Two hours, and the shelves could go back on.

Behind a hob is the one place to think twice. A recessed joint collects what a flat tile would wipe off in one stroke. Seal it, or keep the pattern away from the frying pan and use it on the run either side.

More than 10 patterns are usually enough to match existing stone, timber or joinery without printing a special run. If none of them lands, we print to a sample — ask before you specify, because a custom pattern has a minimum order and a longer lead time.

Lime, kitchen splashback

Where it works, and where it does not

The material settles most of this. The pattern only decides which room.

Ordering

Under 500 m² of a single pattern the sheets ship in a plywood crate, and the crate is charged separately; above that they go on pallets. Send a wall drawing, a photo of the space or the pattern number you want to see and we reply within one working day with a take-off and a delivered price. If the number has to be built from the area rather than the drawing, the price guide shows how it is put together.

Questions