Clients spend months choosing a tile and about ninety seconds choosing what goes between the tiles. Yet the joint is roughly what you see when you look down a floor at a shallow angle, it is the part that stains, and it is the part that fails first if it is wrong for the room. The good news is that there are only four decisions — width, material, colour and movement — and each one has a fairly clear answer once the room is known.
Joint width, and why it is not zero
Rectified tiles — machine-edged after firing so every piece is dimensionally identical — allow joints of 2–3 mm, and that is what gives large formats their continuous look. Non-rectified tiles vary slightly piece to piece and need a wider joint, typically 3–5 mm, to absorb the variation.
No tiled surface should be laid without a joint. The joint absorbs thermal movement, minor structural movement and the dimensional tolerance of the tile itself. Butt-jointed tiling looks impressive for one season and then chips along its edges, because two hard surfaces with nowhere to move take the stress at their corners. A fine joint is a working detail, not a compromise.
Cementitious or epoxy
Cementitious grout is the default: workable, repairable, available in a wide colour range and entirely adequate for dry-area floors and walls. Its weakness is porosity — it absorbs water and staining, and in a shower or a kitchen splash zone it will discolour over time even when sealed.
Epoxy grout is non-porous, chemically resistant and effectively stain-proof, which makes it the right choice for showers, wet rooms, kitchen backsplashes, terraces and pool surrounds. It costs more to install because it demands a faster, more disciplined application — it must be cleaned off the tile face within its working window or it sets on the surface. Insist on a team that has used it before, and specify it room by room rather than across the whole house.
Colour: match or contrast, decide deliberately
Matching the grout to the tile makes the surface read as continuous and lets the material dominate — the usual choice for large-format floors and slab walls, where the entire point is to minimise the grid. Contrasting grout does the opposite: it draws the eye to the pattern, which is what a hexagon, an encaustic-look or a subway layout is often for.
Two practical notes. Avoid brilliant white on floors — it is the least forgiving colour there is, and it shows every mark within a year; a soft grey or a warm off-white does the same visual job and ages far better. And in wet areas, choose a mid-tone rather than either extreme, since both very light and very dark grouts show water marks and residue most clearly.
Movement joints — the detail everyone omits
A tiled floor expands and contracts. It needs a soft, flexible joint wherever it meets a wall, at internal corners, over structural joints, around columns, and at intervals across a large field — commonly in the region of every 6 to 8 metres indoors, and considerably closer outdoors where temperature swing is greater.
These are filled with a flexible sealant, not grout, and they are usually hidden under the skirting at the perimeter so nothing is visible. Omitting them is the single most common cause of tiles tenting or debonding in a large floor a year or two after laying — a failure that has nothing to do with the tile or the adhesive. Punjab's summer-to-winter swing makes this worth insisting on, especially on terraces and balconies.
Getting it specified on your project
Bring the tile selection and the room list to the studio and we will set out the joint width, grout type and colour room by room, and mark where movement joints belong — a fifteen-minute exercise at Sector 82, Mohali that saves a repair later. Our tiles page covers surface and slip choices for wet areas, and the large-format guide covers the substrate work that sits underneath all of it.
