What wood look tile is
A fired ceramic body, almost all of it porcelain here, cut long and narrow instead of square, with a printed surface and usually a texture pressed into it that follows the grain. Held in the hand it is unmistakably tile. Seen across a room at standing height it is not.
People often say ceramic when they mean either one, and the two bodies are not interchangeable. Porcelain is fired denser and absorbs almost nothing, which is what carries it through outdoor use, wet rooms and heavy traffic. Ceramic absorbs more and is rated for lighter duty, so its place is on walls and on residential floors. The great majority of what is here is porcelain.
Plank formats in tile
8x40 is the commonest format in this range, with 8x48, 12x48 and 6x24 behind it, and a few running to 10x60. Those proportions come from lumber, not from tile: a tile that is going to read as a board has to have a board's ratio.
The long formats are also the harder ones to lay flat, because a longer piece shows any movement in the surface beneath it more clearly than a square tile does. That is a question for whoever sets the floor, and it is the reason the format and the room are usually decided together.
Rectified edges and the joint
Rectified means the edges were ground to an exact dimension after firing, and the tile page explains the process. What matters on a wood look floor specifically is the consequence: a narrow joint is most of what makes a tiled floor read as boards rather than as tile.
Real boards meet each other almost edge to edge, so a wide grout line is the single detail that gives a wood look floor away from standing height. That is why the rectified planks in this range are the ones specified where the illusion has to hold in a living room, and the non-rectified ones do fine in a laundry or a bathroom where nobody is looking for it.
Shade variation and repeat
Two numbers decide whether a wood look floor convinces anyone. The first is shade variation, published against each product, and here it runs from low through V4: a low rating means the planks match each other, a high one means they differ on purpose the way boards from different trees do.
The second is the number of different faces in the run. A print is made from a set number of original scans, and once a floor is big enough the same board starts reappearing. Where a maker publishes that count it is worth reading, because it is what separates a floor that convinces from one that starts to look like a pattern.
Where wood look tile goes
The rooms a wood floor is kept out of: bathrooms, laundries, basements, and anywhere below grade. A porcelain body does not care about standing water, so the floor can run from a hallway into a shower room without changing material at the door.
It also sits over underfloor heating without the movement a wood board has, and a few of these are made thick enough to go outside as pavers, which lets an indoor floor continue onto a terrace in the same face.
Wood look tile, engineered wood and vinyl plank
Three products answer the same wish and they are not ranked against each other. Engineered hardwood has a real wood face that can be sanded and rewards close looking. Luxury vinyl plank is warm and quiet underfoot and goes down over almost anything.
Tile is the hardest surface of the three and the only one that is genuinely indifferent to water, which is why it wins bathrooms and loses bedrooms. Choosing between them is choosing which room you are solving for.
Matte faces and color
Almost everything here is matte, which is the finish a wood floor has. A gloss on a wood look tile is the detail that gives the whole floor away. Beige and gray lead the color range with brown behind them.
The gray group is worth separating out. Gray in wood comes from weathering or from a stain, not from the species, so a gray wood look tile is copying a finish and not a wood. That makes it the freest of the three colors: there is no original it has to be faithful to. The wood look porcelain page holds the porcelain half of this range on its own.
