I'm redoing a bathroom in a house with a lot of wood throughout the home, including wood on all interior walls. This includes the bathrooms pre-renovation. The lower half of the interior bathroom walls had been a faux tile, with the upper half a wood paneling.

I've started the renovation and was leaning toward replacing the faux tile with a real tile--essentially doing a "restoration" that preserved the old look but made it more authentic. The issue I'm facing is what to do about the top half of the walls. I wanted to likewise upgrade the top portion of the walls from the common 60's wood panelling to a classier tongue-and-groove pine board, which I planned on painting (probably white to complement white tile below).

My contractor remarked to me today that I might want to think that through a bit, as he'd never seen a wood panelling on the top half of a wall with a tile on the bottom half. And I've been surfing around Houzz and Pinterest this evening, and he's right--usually you see a tile bottom half wall OR a wooden wainscot bottom half wall, but with sheetrock/knockdown top halves. I've searched, but I've not been able to find ANY pictures of a tongue-and-groove top half-wall over a tiled bottom half-wall.

This is causing me to second guess myself. The house has no sheetrock in it anywhere whatsoever, but the old faux tile was used in both bathrooms and the kitchen area. That makes me feel confident about "restoring" the bathroom with real tile--but I'm leery of adding sheet rock to the bathrooms since it's not anywhere else in the home.

So what do I do? Be creatively bold and go with my plan of putting tongue-and-groove boards over top of a tile half-wall? Or add sheetrock/knockdown to my bathrooms, despite the fact that that would break with the look of the rest of the house?