The Classic Look of Mid-Century Modern Tile Flooring

Featured Image: Marvel Calacatta Extra Polished 24×48 Porcelain Floor Tile from Arizona Tile

Tile selection for your floors is a crucial choice to make. Knowing the characteristics of the tile and loving the aesthetics helps to further guide your decision. We have some timeless floor tile options within a mid-century modern motif that will heighten your design senses!

Mid-century modern (MCM for short) design style incorporates natural elements and marries them with modern features, like clean lines and minimalistic characteristics. Whether you have an open concept layout, a high-traffic area, kids, pets, or the complete opposite, we have mid-century modern style tile to emphasize stunning aesthetics while withstanding day-to-day use.

About Mid-Century Modern

Mid-century modern design started to become popular around the 1930s, and featured minimalistic detail, clean lines, simplicity, contrasting textures, and functionality. Prior to this, design trends emphasized ornate detail, so this shift was drastic. With a minimalistic approach, the mid-century modern design trend lacked unnecessary embellishments and focused on only the essential elements. These characteristics featured German and Scandinavian influences, and presented a less cluttered design and promoted a calm appeal.

Clean, organic lines played a significant role in furniture, like tables and chairs. Instead of finding intrinsic wood carvings, for example, MCM focused on function and minimized elaboration. MCM design combines a variety of materials like wood and man-made products, to create an iconic aesthetic.

This style also features a strong focus on nature and integrating that from within, mainly with large windows and the use of wood, stone, and plants within the home. MCM incorporated pops of color and geometric designs, mixing them with neutral hues, to truly gain visual interest and dimension.

Components like these make for a clear understanding of why mid-century modern tile—and design as a whole—remain popular. Therefore, it’s hard to go wrong when selecting MCM, especially when working with the natural stone and tile inventory that we have to offer. When designing a home room by room, it can be fun to focus on specific areas you want to highlight – for example, in your kitchen, maybe it’s the tile floor you want to prioritize.  To help you find that perfect MCM look, we’ve put together four categories of materials inspired by this iconic design style:

• Concrete Look Tile
• Natural Stone Look Tile
• Patterned Tile
• Agglomerate Marble Tile

Concrete Look Tile

Concrete features add a modern look to a kitchen. Luckily, you don’t have to resort to real, super heavy concrete, but can use concrete-looking tile to perfect your MCM kitchen. Porcelain tile, like Pietra Italia offers the perfect alternative. Pietra Italia echoes the aesthetic of concrete, making it a great fit for a mid-century modern design. Pair it with Oxide Honed quartz on your countertops for a cohesive finish. The subtle texture and tone of this slab complement the tile beautifully. In the picture below, you can see how the combination of concrete tones and warm wood accents creates a striking, MCM-inspired space.

Image: Pietra Italia Beige 24×48 Large-Format Porcelain Kitchen Floor Tile from Arizona Tile

Natural Stone Look Tile

Natural stone is one of those key features of mid-century modern design that helps connect the indoors with the outdoors. If you love the look of natural stone but prefer something easier to care for, porcelain tile is a beautiful alternative. Stone-look porcelain offers the texture, veining, and elegance of natural stone with minimal maintenance and maximum durability. Trav is an exceptional example of this: it is a porcelain tile that emulates natural travertine. Because it’s porcelain, it can withstand high levels of traffic in your kitchen.  Add Prism marble as a backsplash and Basalt 4×16  as an accent—both natural stone—to electrify the dynamic of contrasting colors and materials in the space.

Another way to incorporate a natural stone look on your countertops or vertical surfaces is with our DT-Marvel Calacatta Extra Polished. This is a versatile porcelain slab that’s durable, easy to maintain, and looks like natural stone.

Image: Trav Grey 12×24 Porcelain Kitchen Tile Flooring, Oxide Honed Quartz Kitchen Island Countertop, Prism Crema/Sky Marble Patterned Tile Kitchen Backsplash, & Basalt 4×16 Wall Tile from Arizona Tile

Patterned Floor Tile

Original mid-century modern tile could be characterized by fun shapes, designs, and colors, while in the latter years of the trend, neutral features gained more popularity. Cementine Black and White is a porcelain series that provides the charm and elegance of a vintage effect. It comes in five unique designs that provide great variety and will enhance a mid-century modern design, whether you choose to use this tile only as an accent or to cover an entire floor!

Image: Cementine Black & White 4 Porcelain Patterned Floor Tile from Arizona Tile

Agglomerate Marble Tile

Agglomerate marble offers a mid-century modern appeal that may be hard to contend with. The term “agglomerate” refers to the material being made up of small pieces of stone fused together using resin. This process creates a durable material that is resistant to scratches, stains, and chips.  Iceberg is a polished agglomerate marble that is comprised of white resin and embedded with large chunks of grey marble—a great option if you’re looking for something unique but not overwhelming. 

To complement Iceberg Agglomerate, Nuage quartzite, and Calacatta Divine quartz will brighten the space, enrich the aesthetics, and create a stunning display of natural and manufactured materials.

Image: Iceberg Agglomerate Marble 24×24 Large-Format Kitchen Floor Tile, Nuage Quartzite Kitchen Countertop Waterfall Island, & Calacatta Divine Quartz Countertop and Backsplash from Arizona Tile

How Will You Incorporate MCM?

Once you understand mid-century modern design, it’s hard not to fall in love with it, and we hope this gave you plenty of inspiration for your own kitchen transformation. For more photo inspiration, check out our kitchen photo gallery. If you want more product information and ideas, browse all of our porcelain tile options, as well as our new Della Terra Porcelain Slabs. You can learn more about our basalt, marble, and quartzite natural stone, and peruse all of our Della Terra® Quartz slabs as well.

Once you’ve narrowed down some of the products you want to use, try our Just Imagine Tile and Slab Visualizer to gain a better visual sense. And don’t forget to stop by an Arizona Tile showroom or slab yard to see materials, colors, and designs in person. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to send us a message!