This gallery includes custom tile showers completed by TileArt in Fort Collins, Loveland, Windsor, and Northern Colorado. Projects include Schluter Kerdi waterproofed showers, Kerdi-Board shower walls, curbless showers, steam showers, shower benches, niches, linear drains, glass tile, porcelain tile, natural stone, and full shower rebuilds after failed waterproofing.
A shower is the most difficult thing in the house to tile
Every other tiled surface in a home is a floor or a wall. A shower is a wet room that has to stay sealed for decades while the house around it moves, and almost none of what makes it work is visible when the job is finished. That is why the same tile can look identical in two showers and one of them fails in six years.
The part that matters is underneath. Tile and grout are not waterproof – water passes through grout joints as a matter of course, which is completely normal. The waterproofing layer behind and beneath the tile is what actually keeps water out of the framing, and the shower base has to be built so that water reaching that layer drains to the weep path instead of sitting. Get those two things right and the tile is the easy part. Get them wrong and no amount of good tile work saves it. Our page on why tile installations fail goes through the failures we see most.
Choosing tile for a shower
Walls and floors have different requirements, and the floor is the one people get wrong.
Shower walls are forgiving. Porcelain and glazed ceramic both work, large format is fine, and the choice is mostly aesthetic. Natural stone is beautiful in a shower but needs sealing and, depending on the stone, a setting material chosen to avoid staining it from behind.
Shower floors are the opposite. Slip resistance matters, and a tile that meets the wet DCOF threshold on a test machine can still be a poor choice underfoot. This is why small mosaics remain the common answer – not because of the look, but because a floor made of small tiles has a lot of grout joint, and grout joint is texture. A linear drain changes the math by letting a larger-format floor slope in one direction instead of four, which is worth discussing if you want bigger tile down there.
If you are still deciding between materials, ceramic and porcelain tile explained covers what actually separates them, and how to pick the perfect grout covers why we prefer Laticrete SpectraLOCK epoxy in showers – it does not stain and never needs sealing.
The details that make a shower feel custom
Most of what people notice in a finished shower is detail work: a niche sized to the tile so it does not end in a sliver cut, a bench that drains rather than pooling, corners where the pattern actually lines up, and edges finished with a profile or a mitered return instead of a bullnose that does not match. None of it is structural. All of it is the difference between a shower that looks installed and one that looks built. Our installation methods page covers how we approach the whole build, and bathroom tile shows the rest of the room.
Planning a shower? Call (970) 213-3682 or use our contact form for a free estimate. Roger Lodwig is a Certified Tile Installer (CTI #847) and has been installing tile since 1998.
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