Here’s our guide to the best marble kitchen floor tiles including their pros and cons, cost, and design ideas to help improve the overall aesthetic of your kitchen.
Marble is one of the best natural stone types, because of its high durability, hardness, ease of cleaning, sleek shine, classiness, and elegant appeal it brings to the culinary space.
It is a natural stone that is versatile since it can be applied in your kitchen as floor tiles, wall tiles, as well as countertop because it’s resistant, cracking, and breaking strength are higher than other stone.
Marble flooring offers more flexibility in its application to your kitchen than simply giving it a particular aesthetic appeal. Below are some of the inherent benefits of opting to use marble flooring in your kitchen.
Marble Floors Pros and Cons
Here’s our marble kitchen floor tiles pros and cons beginning with the pros:
Marble Pros
• Attractive kitchen flooring – Marble comes in beautiful, unique design patterns and colorful hues. One of the most significant benefits of using marble flooring in the kitchen is its timeless beauty, versatility and increased home value.
• Durable – High durability and hardness are the important factors for homeowners to choose marble over any other natural stone. Its stability and strength can handle a wide range of pressure of foot traffic and other constant loading and unloading. There is a wide range of application due to the toughness of marble and that is one quality that makes it unique.
• Enhance the Natural Beauty of Stone – A polished marble offers a smooth and shiny surface that brings out the natural beauty in marble, making kitchen floors more appealing. Polishing of marble floors offers an added protection against stains and other related damages due to moisture and wetness.
• Reflective – Marble has a little translucent characteristic which allows light to go through and allows marble to shine and illuminate beautifully.
• Natural Material – For those who have a liking for an eco-friendly lifestyle, opting to install marble flooring in the kitchen can be a great advantage due to marble being an all-natural material and having eco-friendly quality since it can be recycled, and it does not cause any environmental pollution at all.
• Elegant Flooring Choice – There is a sense of affluence attached to choosing marble as flooring, and they add a sense of finesse to a kitchen by giving the interiors their unique features.
On the other hand, marble floorings also have several disadvantages which you need to know before deciding whether marble would be suitable for your kitchen flooring option.
Marble Cons
• Costly – Marble is an expensive material to use compared to other natural stones. The cost of marble can go even higher when choosing designer mosaics, non-standard sizes, or larger tiles and slabs.
• Extra Care Required – Marble is soft stone so there’s a high chance that it can get scratched, cracked, and chipped very easily when compared to other natural stone flooring materials.
• Can Be Stained – Because of its porous nature, marble is susceptible to staining as well. If you are using furniture with more iron content, we don’t recommend you use marble for your flooring because marble becomes yellowish after absorbing iron after a long period of time.
• Spills Must Be Cleaned Quickly – Due to having a little alkaline composition, marble is also likely to get stained in case of any spillage from any acidic substance.
• Challenging to Fix – Repairing a scratched or stained marble flooring can be a very difficult job as well. However, you can protect marble flooring from staining and being scratched by sealing and polishing it.
• Needs Skilled Installation – Labor cost of marble is very time consuming and needs skilled labor for its installation.
• May Be Slippery – When marble has been polished, it tends to become slippery and so if your kitchen is often wet, it becomes a safety hazard for accidental falls.
Which Marble Is Best For Flooring?
Most locally manufactured marble is imported from China, India, Iran, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Egypt, Portugal, and Greece. Here are some of the best types of marble used in residential homes:
Carrara – the most common Italian type of marble and one of the most popular types of stone used in flooring applications. This type of marble has grayish-white background with soft, feathery gray veining.
Calacatta – the most luxurious and expensive marble available in the US market, due to its rarity since it only comes from specific quarries in the Carrara region of Italy.
This type of marble has much darker, thick veining patterns over a bright white field background. Calacatta marble ranges from gold to brown to beige to dark gray for its background color.
Statuary – coming from the same Carrara region in Italy, this type of marble has a more translucent white background but not as much color variation as Calacatta.
The veins of Statuary marble have more dramatic veining, usually in a dark gray hue. This gives it a more luxurious feeling because there’s a lot of contrast between light and dark in this stone.
Emperador – This type of marble is best described as robust and vigorous marble that is being quarried in Spain, and its field background comes in various shades of brown with defined white feathery veins.
Crema marfil – coming from Mount Coto, Spain; this type of marble is in fact a limestone. It usually has a textured creamy beige stone with soft veins. The most common color includes subtle tones of yellow, cinnamon, white and even goldish beige.
Talathello – this type of marble is from Turkey, and it is also known as silver beige marble. This type of marble has a light grey background with silver or beige vein speckles deposits that are lighter than the background.
Levadia black – This is a very striking, superb, and polished black marble from Greece. It has countless, swirling smoke-like light gray veining. This type of marble is not often used for floors but makes a very striking statement and even can have a surprisingly calming effect.
How Much Does Marble Flooring Cost?
Marble, generally are on the high-end range of all-natural stone, being one of the top architectural elements, marble floorings are priced accordingly.
Typically, marble cost $10 to $20 per square foot for the material alone, plus an additional of $3 to $7 per square foot for labor installation by a professional. Installation will cost more for complicated layouts or designs which require a lot of cutting such as mosaics, motifs, and borders.
These types of patterns that include a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal installation can affect that price as well. Other factors that can cause price difference include the grade, size, shape, thickness, and finish of the marble.
Some marble runs as high as $40 per square foot. Specialty imported marble such as Carrara costs $75 to $100 a square foot without installation, since it is the best-priced marble, being less high-end and the most common type.
Calacatta and Statuary marble, cost as much as $250 a square foot, since it’s rarer, popular and is a more sought-after type of marble. See our best kitchen floor ideas on a budget here.
Marble Tile Design Patterns
Marble floor design has a variety of choices since it is most customizable. Such design options include herringbone, brick, regular, repeating, borders, motifs, mosaics, or medallions. Check our guide to marble flooring for more designs.
Regular Pattern
This is the most basic pattern for a floor marble design. Larger pieces of marble are laid horizontally creating a more open feeling.
We suggest using this type of pattern or design when a space is busier, and you want to add order by making a simpler design pattern on your kitchen flooring.
Repeating Pattern
This design floor pattern can be done creatively by laying different tiles on every other piece, or every two pieces in a repetitive format, as the name suggests.
Herringbone Pattern
This is an arrangement of rectangle or parallelogram shape blocks meant to resemble the bones of a herring fish. Usually, this can be done either all in the same color marble or switching between rows.
Bordering
This is a type of design which can be incorporated with any of the other design patterns. Borders are usually created using a different shape or color piece of tile around the outside of the pattern which gives the kitchen flooring a more defined look.
White Marble Floor
Marble floors are always unique and are timelessly attractive. Marble adds value to your property because marble is expensive and should be maintained well.
Using marble on floors in the kitchen will improve the overall upscale of your kitchen and create an elegant space.
White marble floors have been popularly used in kitchens for a long time. Incorporating white marble floors in the kitchen has been an aspect in many design periods.
It has proved and offered aesthetic appeal, timelessness, and adaptability; bringing a classic elegance to any kitchen, that creates a more luxurious design scheme.
White marble, like Carrara, creates a sense of old-world magnificence when used in kitchen flooring. It makes the kitchen appear bigger and brighter as it deflects sunlight beautifully.
The soft vein pattern of Carrara marble really goes well with any kitchen design because the color and pattern blend well with the clean aesthetic of the space.
White marble is so versatile that it can be paired with many other finishes in the kitchen to add some depth and dimension to the space.
Having white marble flooring in the kitchen allows you to pair the marble with wood or antiqued finish cabinetry in white, combined with white salt & pepper granite countertop.
There is also a welcoming and cozy feel in the kitchen with white marble with light beige veins that give the space a softer, warm tone. Read more about the different types of kitchen floor tiles here.
Black Marble Tiles
Black marble floors can easily become a focal point in the kitchen, because of their cool, rich, and distinguished look. Black marble flooring is a great choice for a modern, sleek, and contemporary kitchen upgrade.
It is an essential element in creating an exceptional ambience that offers sophistication and a perfect amount of mystery to your kitchen.
Black marble floors offer drama and timeless beauty to your kitchen especially when opting for a monochrome color palette.
By installing black marble floors, it offers an excellent groundwork for experimenting with textures and structures which at the same time can be fashionable, and provide a timeless elegance in flooring design.
Integrating marble flooring in the kitchen can instantly elevate the sophisticated vibe of your kitchen and will make a statement.
Visit our guide to the most popular kitchen flooring ideas to see more kitchen floor designs.