How to Keep Your Marble Looking Its Best
For many homeowners, marble is an enticing material that seems suitable for a wide variety of different applications. It’s a gorgeous part of many kitchens, bathrooms, showers, even flooring, and to help maintain its beauty, marble requires specific care to make sure it remains clean and unscathed by debris or dust. Here are a few tips you can refer to clean your own marble or if you’re thinking about adding an application of marble to your own home.
- Only use mild, pH-neutral cleaners to clean marble. Common cleaners like bleach or ammonia can strip the top layer of the marble, leaving dull spots where a shine should be. Mild cleaners that you can use to clean marble include stone soaps and phosphate-free, biodegradable liquid dishwashing soaps.
- Frequently use a clean, untreated dust mop to clean floors. Dust and debris buildup can scratch marble flooring if tread underfoot.
- Use floor mats or rugs inside and outside to protect the areas around entryways. This will keep people from tracking damaging debris onto the marble.
- Use acid-substitute porcelain or ceramic cleaner (we recommend Miracle Porcelain & Ceramic Tile Cleaner or Miracle Heavy Duty Cleaner) to clear soap scum from showers as needed. Frequent squeegeeing is the best way to clean the shower though!
https://www.instagram.com/p/CAGAfA1HIaA/
If you use these tips, you can rest assured that your marble will always look its best! To see what marble tile at its best looks like, read on!
Marble Tile at Its Best
Real marble is completely inimitable. There are many materials, such as painted granite or quartz, designed to reproduce the look of marble, but none of them come close to the glimmering opalescence demonstrated by authentic polished marble. Even if the veining, color, and texture of marble is copied exactly, real marble has one visual element that just can’t be replicated by even the best copies: the translucent top layer. After being quarried and cut into slabs and individual tiles, all marble used in the home undergoes a polishing process, in which the true beauty of marble is revealed. During this process, the natural color of the marble is exposed, but more importantly, the polishing process clarifies the top layer of the marble, removing any hints of cloudiness. When you look at polished marble, what you’re actually seeing is the layer underneath a clear top layer, so in the right light, the top clear layer can reflect and refract light, giving marble the glowing glimmer it’s renowned for. You can see this quality in vibrantly lit rooms like this:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5pedroDrQK/
This picture is really just a taste of the pearlescence offered by marble. This bathroom, which makes brilliant use of our Casablanca Carrara Diamond Mosaic marble tile, is a masterclass in using lighting to enhance the room’s best qualities. In this bathroom, bright white is the obvious primary color, which is a fairly common choice in spaces that make use of white marble, especially marble mosaic tile. This common use case is simply because white marble mosaic tile tends to soften the white’s brightness without darkening the space. In this bathroom, the Diamond Marble Mosaic Tile adds just a touch of grey and a dash of texture, keeping the space from feeling too harsh or one-note. Additionally, the slight glimmer refracts the light just enough to create the appearance of light more evenly dispersed throughout the room. So to recap a bit, in this context, marble mosaic tile softens stark light, adds necessary texture, and provides a bit of fascinating glimmer. Pretty impressive for a single design choice!
Outside of the bathroom, marble mosaic tile makes its home in kitchens, entryways, and even laundry rooms:
This small room is the perfect place for the classic shape of marble mosaic tile, picket. This delicate variety of tile (Casablanca Carrara Pickett Mosaic) is among our most popular marble offerings, and for good reason! This shape has been used in numerous cultures dating back centuries and is remarkably well-suited for marble. In this sunny laundry room, the Pickett Mosaic Marble Tile takes on a more understated role. Unlike the vibrant bathroom above, this space has a few different colors interacting with each other. There’s a sleek black countertop contrasted by white cabinets and a silver sink fixture placed alongside brass cabinet knobs and handles. So what’s the role of marble mosaic tile in this laundry room? Simply put, the marble serves to unite these disparate elements into a single cohesive idea. As seen in here, backsplashes often serve a dual purpose: keeping walls protected and acting as middle ground for the room’s design elements. For the first purpose, marble tile is obviously a great choice, as it’s easy to clean as well as water- and stain-resistant. What makes marble such an outstanding choice for the latter task is in its veining. Like most varieties of marble, our Casablanca Carrara marble features natural variations in color courtesy of the geologic processes marble undergoes during its formation. These additional colors (shades of delicate grey in the case of Casablanca Carrara) are an outstanding way of transitioning different design elements into one another, somewhat softening the edges of the contrast. Both literally and figuratively, Casablanca Carrara Pickett Mosaic acts as the grey area between black and white, and it does it in style.
Choosing Your Marble with Riad Tile
There’s no shortage of reasons to love marble tiles. Taking the best of the beauty of marble slabs and combining it with the practicality of the tile form, it’s no wonder marble tiles have been growing in popularity with each passing year, and nothing makes us happier than giving our customers access to the real thing. At Riad Tile, we work hard to ensure that our prices on high-quality materials like marble tile are as low as possible, because we believe that you shouldn’t have to accept substitutions when building your home. Materials like marble mosaic tile are wholly unique, and despite the claims of copycats, it simply can’t be faked. With Riad Tile, we guarantee that you will receive only the finest marble tile at a price you can afford. Seems too good to be true? Order a sample today and we’ll ship you any of our variations of marble tile directly to your front door, so you can see it in person.
