Cement Tiles

Cement tiles or hydraulic tiles are handmade colourful tiles used as floor and wall tiling. They appeared in Catalonia (Spain) in the 1850s, and have been widely used in Europe and America. Another origin is from Viviers, in the south of France, location of the famous cement factory Lafarge. They represented a revolution in flooring in their day because they were much cheaper, more durable and easier to make than the previous handmade glazed ceramic tiles and were therefore more universally available for houses, and they allowed for profuse decorative patterns, their age of splendour being the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th centuries, before they were gradually superseded by newer technologies as of the 1960s, such as terrazzo, salt-glazed stoneware, etc. that did not allow for such decorative embellishment but were cheaper.

Cement tiles are not fired; there is no glaze layer on the surface of the tile. They derive their durability from the combination of finely dehydrated ground Portland cement layer and a coarser layer of sand and cement. The pigment layer is hydraulically pressed into the surface and becomes a part of the tile.