Commercial Tile

Commercial tile is a schedule with a finish on it. The floor has to survive the use, the spec has to be met, and the handover date doesn’t move. We install tile in restaurants, retail, lobbies, offices and tenant improvements across Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, and we bring the same setting discipline from our residential work to jobs where the general contractor is watching the calendar.

What we take on

Restaurant and café floors and walls, including kitchens with cove bases and quarry or porcelain floors that take grease and hot water. Retail floors and feature walls where the tile is part of the brand. Lobbies and corridors in office and residential buildings. Commercial washrooms built as wet rooms. Showrooms, salons, clinics and medical offices. Tenant improvement packages where the tile is one line in a larger scope and has to land in sequence with the millwork and the mechanical trades.

Substrate before spec

Commercial slabs have histories. Previous tenants patched them, cut trenches for plumbing, and laid flooring that left adhesive behind. New slabs are still curing and still releasing moisture. Before we quote we test flatness with a straightedge and moisture with a meter, and we tell the GC what we find. Crack isolation membranes go over control joints and cracks. Movement joints are planned into the layout where the floor runs long, changes direction, or meets a wall, and they’re filled with sealant, not grout. A commercial floor that skips this is a floor that will be replaced in five years.

Materials for traffic

Porcelain, almost always. Rated for the traffic class, with a slip resistance that matches the use: higher for a restaurant kitchen or a washroom, lower for a showroom. Large-format porcelain for lobbies and retail where the continuous surface is the look; see our large-format tile page for the flatness that demands. Quarry tile where the spec calls for it. Epoxy or high-performance grout in food service and washrooms, because cementitious grout can’t take the cleaning chemicals. Stone where the design specifies it, with the sealing schedule written into the maintenance plan; our natural stone page covers what that means.

Commercial washrooms

A commercial washroom is a wet room that gets cleaned with chemicals several times a day. We build them the way we build residential showers, with a full waterproofing membrane under the floor and behind the wall tile, floors sloped to drains, cove bases where the spec calls for them, and tile to the ceiling. Grout and sealants are chosen for the cleaning regime, not the colour chart.

Working with the general contractor

We read the drawings and the spec before we walk the site, and we flag what won’t work on paper before it becomes a change order. Material lead times are confirmed before the schedule is locked. Our dates are held so the trades after us hold theirs, and if something on site is going to move the schedule, the GC hears it from us first. Deficiencies are walked against the spec and closed before handover.

Feature work in commercial spaces

Restaurants and retail want tile that photographs: patterned floors, hand-glazed walls, bookmatched slab at a reception desk, mitred edges on a bar face. It’s the same custom tile installation work we do in homes, built to a commercial schedule. The layout is set out on paper, the pattern centres where the design says, and the corners are mitred.

Where we work

Commercial jobs across the region: restaurants and retail along Main and Commercial Drive in Vancouver, tenant improvements in the Burnaby towers, Richmond showrooms and restaurants, and new commercial space in Surrey, Langley and the Fraser Valley. Each city page covers the local side.

Send the drawings and the spec, or a description of the space and the date you need it done. Request a quote and we’ll start with the slab.