Sorry to say but it looks like your tile setter didn't even take the slightest effort to make the pattern flow on the walls or the floor. I have an obvious fake marble tile (with diagonal direction) in my hall bath but my tile guy carefully considered each tile to make it flow as best as possible. I have a tub/shower combo so no shower floor tile to deal with but here is how the tub walls and the bathroom floor look

Not sure what I would do in your case, since the do over will probably be on your dime and will be expensive but I don't know if I could tolerate it the way it is.

Thanks, Badgergal. I’m going to fight this tooth and nail to get it redone on their dime. We are playing a premium for this tile (35% markup through the builder), so I’m not paying any more because they messed up the installation.

We had same situation as Badgergal, and our guy spent quite a bit of time choosing tile placement. This setter has done prior jobs for us, and we know he takes pride in his work. Even so, he discussed our expectations with us, so thank goodness no surprises.

When my tile guy works with similar tiles he outlines shower walls on the floor, lays out the tiles, and moves them around to get the best pattern flow throughout... If a customer is involved we would show the layout before installing the tile and make changes if needed.

If you start taking tiles with busy patterns/veining out of the box and throw them up on the wall, 90% of the time you end up with messy areas.

Good luck

As much as I agree with the above comments, you have very busy tile and I think even if you try to put certain way, still might look busy and chaotic and you might end up not liking it.

There's NO WAY to make a tile as busy as that "flow" and look like a slab install. You have unrealistic expectations, and should have chosen a slab to put on your walls.

Minard, this is the way it’s supposed to look on wall (different color)

And, this is supposed to be the mosaic floor look. A professional tile installer should be able to do this. My builder says the boxes are even numbered. He is working with the tile company now to get this fixed.

I am all for doing the things the best they can but being realistic with your particular tile, the business, darker color than you showed comparing to above picture, and 12×24" size, it's going to look busy and less or more chopped. I am talking here from my personal experience doing a bathroom with much bigger tiles 24x48" and less veiny, it was already getting busy for my taste while looking at the whole bathroom. And regarding the rendering of floor tile, don't believe you can make this perfect ats it's shown unless you have those tiles marked to make it flow like that and if you have in the box all the tiles to do this flowing. Very unrealistic.

I don't think the picture you show of how it is supposed to look is a real picture. It is either heavily photoshopped and put together out of pictures of the tile, or it is completely virtual rendering. So I don't think any installer could get that tile to look just like that picture unless they bought twice as much as is needed so they could eliminate any tile that did not look exactly how they wanted.

I think it could be laid out better than it was. But I don't think anybody could lay out the tile in the way your "supposed to look" pictures represent. At least without spending a lot on extra tile.

Tile will never flow quite like that floor mosaic rendering. Grout lines don't do that even if the tiles were cut perfect from a slab. But for sure those floor tiles could have been laid with them all flowing in the same direction.

Your walls for sure could flow better, but you would need to have extra tile to make them all flow on the angle or flow on the horizontal- mixing the two flows in a busy pattern can look off, even with a great tile job. Like in the example this is how it's supposed to look pic, it's mostly horizontal flow tiles. If those boxes came with angle flow as well as horizontal, the angle ones were culled out prior to install.

This is our first time building a house. What’s frustrating for us is that, when we picked out that wall tile, I spent a lot of time looking at photos of it installed online. I figured that the photos of this particular tile on the page of the supplier is how it would look installed. Perhaps there should be an asterisk on those photos saying that it requires several extra boxes of tile to make it look like that. We are switching to plain white for the floors, but, our builder is working with the tile company to fix the walls. He agrees that this is an error in installation.

The only reason the marketing photos of the tile on the walls looks good is because there is a low contrast between colors.

So glad your builder is on your side with this one. Yes it looks terrible. Yes you have a big learning curve because this is your first time. Yes a tile installer should say do you want me to put these in randomly or in a particular pattern? Anyone's first time at the rodeo is a lot of trail by fire. Great that your builder is working on this.

You’re not the first one to be fooled by online pix. You never really know where those pix originate. The shower floor doesn’t bother me. The bigger tile looks awkward and I wouldn’t like that. However, I would not use either tile for these particular reasons. I’m glad you’re changing up to white floors. That will help. Good luck!

Photoshopped inspiration pictures should never be taken as a blueprint for real life. They are FAKE. The mosaics comes on mesh, the way it comes. It's not placed one by one by anyone, and certainly not with any of that single sheet cut into pieces look. The walls are not designed to match veining in a continuous flow. If someone has those expectations, they need to be purchasing slab material, with a continuous vein pattern. And use a solid for the floor. No tiler would take the job of taking days to lay out a pattern to install it to the wall, unless they charge time and materials for that. $$$$$$

Whoever commented that the ‘inspiration photo’ (light beige and white) is an unrealistic expectation for the color you chose is spot on. What could the installer do to make the walls look any better? There is no ‘flow’ with those tiles at all. You might be better off considering a 1/3 offset vs the stacked if this is a total redo. Or select the beige color way and what you see is what you get.

Thinkdesignlive , another wall of the shower that I didn’t post has nice flow from tile to tile. It just looks like the tile installer completely gave up on that wall.

Same tile for the bathroom floor. Flows nicely from tile to tile and looks great. I just don’t understand why they couldn’t do that for the shower walls as well.