Why trim carries tile sizes
12x24 is the largest size group on this page, followed by 12x48 and 24x24, which looks wrong for a list of trim until you see what those pieces are.
A bullnose, a step tread and a coping all start as a field tile and have one or two edges shaped and finished. The piece keeps the format of the tile it belongs to so that it lines up with the field it finishes, which is why a trim range reads like a tile range with different names.
Most of this page is outdoor
The greater part of this range is 20 mm, which is paving thickness rather than tile thickness, and it belongs to outdoor lines.
Outdoors an edge piece is doing real work. A terrace has steps, a raised edge, a threshold and a change of level somewhere, and each of those needs a piece with a finished front that can also carry a load. A paver on its own leaves a sawn edge showing at every one of them. Porcelain pavers is the range this trim finishes.
The profiles and the edge each one answers
A bullnose rounds one edge and closes a run of tiling where it stops in mid wall. A pencil is a narrow rounded strip used as a line or a cap. A cove base curves from floor to wall so the two meet without a corner. A quarter round fills an internal angle.
Outdoors the list changes. A step tread has a shaped front edge designed to be seen and stood on. A coping caps the edge of a pool or a raised wall and usually overhangs it. A grip or drip profile handles water running off the front. Each answers one condition and none of them substitutes for another.
Why the effects are outdoor stones
Limestone look leads the effects here, then travertine, slate, quartz, stone and bluestone looks, with marble and concrete behind them.
That order is not what an interior tile range carries, where marble look dominates. These are the stones that paved terraces and pool surrounds before porcelain existed, and a trim range mirrors the paving it was made to finish.
Matte, with very little else
Matte covers almost this entire range, with small polished, glossy and honed groups and a handful of anti-slip faces.
On an exterior step that is the only sensible answer, since the piece is walked on and weathered. Indoors it follows the field tile: a trim in a different finish from the tile it borders announces itself as a separate object, which is the one thing a trim piece must not do.
Trim is counted along a line
Field tile is bought by area and trim is bought by length, and mixing the two is where most trim orders go wrong.
What has to be counted is the running distance of every finished edge: the top of a backsplash, both outside corners, the front of each step, the perimeter of a pool. A short length of trim relative to a large floor still amounts to a lot of pieces once every edge is added up.
Trim has to come from the series
The safest edge is one taken from the same series as the field tile, since two matte whites produced by two different makers are almost never the same white and an edge is where the eye compares most closely.
The other reason is thickness. A trim piece and its field tile have to sit at the same height, and a range that pairs 9 mm field tile with trim from a 10 mm line produces a visible step along the whole edge. Checking that the series makes its own trim is worth doing before the field tile is chosen, not after.
Where the narrower trim pages are
Porcelain moldings is the largest material group, marble moldings the quarried stone, and gray porcelain moldings the largest color cut.
For the outdoor pieces specifically, pool and spa paving takes coping and edge assembly, and flooring trim is the separate range that belongs to wood and vinyl floors and not to tile.
