Custom Tile Installation

Custom tile work is what Spartan is known for. Bookmatched marble that mirrors across a shower corner into a single chevron. A cube-pattern wall that lands centred behind the tub and turns every outside corner mitred, with no metal edge anywhere. A floor pattern that starts at the front door and stays true through three rooms. The tile in these jobs isn’t decoration. It’s the architecture, and it has to be built exactly.

What makes tile work custom

The line is simple: if the layout has to be resolved before the first cut, it’s custom. A field of 12 by 24 porcelain on a bathroom wall has a layout, but it forgives. A bookmatched slab wall doesn’t. Neither does a geometric pattern that has to centre on a fixture, a mosaic border that has to meet itself in the corners, or a designer drawing with dimensions on it. Those jobs are planned on paper, set out on the wall, and cut from material that’s too expensive to waste.

We take them on because they’re the work we like most, and because most of the region’s tile trade won’t.

Bookmatched stone and slab

Bookmatching sequences slabs or large tiles so the veining mirrors across the joint. It only works if the seam disappears, which means the slabs are laid out in order before anything is cut, the wall is flat enough that the joint stays tight, and the setter knows which edge of each piece is the mirror. Our Calacatta wet room in North Vancouver and the bookmatched dark wet room in Burnaby are both examples: full-height walls that read as one continuous piece of stone.

Porcelain slab, the 1.2 by 2.4 metre panels, brings the same look with less maintenance, and its own handling: suction frames, a two-person set, and a substrate flat within a few millimetres across the whole wall. See large-format tile for the flatness work and natural stone for what real marble asks of you.

Mitred corners and edges

Metal trim is the default finish for an outside corner because it’s fast. A mitred corner cuts each tile back at 45 degrees so the two faces meet at a sharp line and the pattern turns the corner as one surface. It’s slower, it needs a substrate that won’t move, and it’s what every high-end project asks for. We mitre niches, half walls, tub decks, bench fronts, fireplace surrounds, and the ends of backsplash runs. The geometric accent wall in Langley shows a cube pattern wrapping a mitred corner over waterproofed board mid-install.

Feature walls and patterns

A pattern has to land somewhere on purpose. Behind the tub, centred on the range, symmetric to the window. We find the centre line first, work out how the pattern meets each edge, and adjust the start point so the cuts at the perimeter are balanced. Then we set out full-scale on the wall before mixing thinset. Hex, herringbone, chevron, basketweave, cubes, penny rounds, hand-cut mosaics, mixed-material fields: all of it is layout discipline first.

Working from drawings

The best custom jobs start with resolved drawings. A designer or architect who has dimensioned the layout, called the material, and detailed the edges gives us something to build exactly. We review the drawings against the room and the tile, and we flag what won’t work before it becomes a problem on site: a slab that can’t fit through the door, a pattern that won’t centre because the wall isn’t square, a stone that shouldn’t be in a shower floor. Then we build what’s drawn.

Where custom work lives

Most of it is in bathrooms and showers: slab walls, mitred niches, mosaic floors in powder rooms. Kitchens bring range walls and slab backsplashes. Fireplaces, entry floors, feature walls in living rooms and outdoor porcelain that lines up with the interior floor round it out. The room type doesn’t change the approach; the layout time does.

City-specific pages cover the local side of the work, including custom tile installation in Vancouver, West Vancouver, North Vancouver and Burnaby.

Starting a custom project

Send us the drawings if you have them, or photos and the tile you’re considering if you don’t. We’ll tell you what the layout needs, what the material asks for, and roughly what the labour involves. The real number comes after we’ve seen the room. Request a quote when you’re ready.