For those looking for a beautiful accent tile for an upcoming tile project have a look at our Kimono Bamboo accent tiles for your home or commercial location. The tiles come in two sizes – a 4 x 4 size to match up with more traditional tile sizes as well as a subway tile size of 2.5 x 8 for more horizontal and liner tile projects.

The tiles come in three wonderful colors and all have been a hit with our AnchorBayTile customers. For installation purposes the tiles come with a backing material making for an easy installation for any DIY’er or tile installer.

Kimono Bamboo accent tiles are in stock and ready for immediate shipment.

Ever wonder how Cork goes from Cork Tree to your Home as our Cork Mosaic Tiles. It is quite an interesting process and is a story worth telling. Read on for a little fun history of how Cork came to be used as a material in commerce.

Cork started being used in commerce way back in the late 1600’s by a name that many of you may be familiar with – Dom Perignon. Mr. Perignon was a French Benedictine monk at the time who adapted Cork materials to close bottles of sparkling wine. Fast forward four centuries later and as you all know wine corks have been considered the ultimate wine stopper since its cellular structure makes it easy to compress in to the neck of a bottle where it expands to form a tight seal.

Where does Cork actually come from?
To obtain cork material used to make cork products, Cork is harvested from the outer bark of cork oak trees, always by hand by workers using axes designed to slit the bark without harming the deeper layers of the tree. It can take two decades for a tree to grow old enough for the first harvest, and subsequent culling is done only once every nine or ten years. Most of the cork today is still used by the wine industry primarily, followed next by the shoe and fashion industries who are finding more and more uses for this wonderful material.

We use 100% post-industrial cork material that is not used by the wine industry in order to make our Cork mosaic tiles. We slice the corks and then shape them in to the penny round shapes which you see as our cork mosaic tiles. We have them professionally mesh-mounted for us and then sent to our warehouse for safe keeping before our kind customers decide to use our tiles for their home remodeling projects.

In a nutshell, a fairly straight-forward process from beginning to end and it has worked very well for many years. If we didn’t answer any questions you may have on the making of our Cork Mosaic tiles feel free to give us a shout and we will be glad to answer any additional questions that you may have.

We thought we would follow up our Friday post about using our Bamboo mosaic tiles and our Cork mosaic tiles with a photo of the Cork tiles installed. A product photo often doesn’t do any of our products justice but installation shots are really helpful in allowing a client to visualize what that product might look like in one’s own home.

If you are considering our offer to use our Bamboo mosaic tiles and our Cork mosaic tiles in your remodeling project we look forward to hearing from you.

For those of you planning Green Building projects in 2011 we would love to hear from you. We are looking for a few volunteers to incorporate both our Bamboo Subway or Bamboo Mosaic tiles along with our Cork Mosaic tiles in to the same project. For those projects that might have a place for both materials we would like to make it worth your while to use our materials.

If you have such a project where you can use both our Bamboo and our Cork tiles and you can provide us with nice project photos of the completed project which we can then use on our website we will make it worth your while by offering you a nice special discount on the tiles in exchange for the photos. You have to call to learn what that discount is. We would also like to talk to you by phone once the project is complete so we can learn more details about the project and then profile the project in our Blog.

For those interested in this offer please give us a call at 888 260-7371 and lets talk about the materials you will need and the timing of when you expect to begin your project. We are looking for projects that will begin soon and are timed to be completed by April 30th of this year.

We look forward to hearing from our customers and we hope that we have more than a few takers. We might limit the number of offers we extend depending on the response so please contact us sooner rather than later.

Last week we marked the launch of our Cork Mosaic tiles series by adding this new material to our online tile showroom. We continue to expand our lineup of green materials and we are proud to offer these wonderful Cork mosaic tiles to our customers.

The Cork mosaic tiles are made from 100% post industrial material that is discarded by the wine industry. The cork material is re-purposed by our factory and then pressed in to the one-inch Penny Round shapes and finally meshed on to the two square foot sheets in which they are sold.

The cork tiles are ideal for floors or walls and we actually have installed the tiles in one of our display vignettes here in our Phoenix showroom – and they look beautiful! The tiles are soft on the feet for those considering kitchen installations and they lend such a unique look to any area.

The fact that the cork mosaic tiles are green through and through is a wonderful bonus. Order your samples today and experience the tiles for yourself. If you have any questions about these tiles don’t hesitate to give us a call anytime and we would be glad to help.

First of all we should point out that our Bamboo mosaic tiles in a Waterfall design and our Bamboo Subway tile in 2” x 4” are easy to install due to the fact that they come mesh mounted in approximately one square foot sheets. Mosaics by nature are easy to install and our bamboo mosaic tiles are no different than any other mosaics in this regard.

The Bamboo tiles are meant for interior wall tile projects where there is little exposure to water or moisture. Kitchen backsplashes are a perfect fit for the bamboo tiles and we see a large part of our market will be for kitchen backsplash installations. Accent walls next to hardwood flooring installations will be another popular spot for our bamboo tiles since it is always difficult it seems to find a nice and truly complimentary material to place on certain walls next to hardwood floors. The bamboo tiles will make a very nice complimentary piece.

Commercial projects are a perfect fit for bamboo material. Asian restaurants and Asian themed hospitality projects we think will be a big draw for our bamboo mosaic tiles. We have had quite a bit of success in the past with such projects and we expect this to continue with our Kaguya Bamboo tiles collection.

Tell us where you think our new Bamboo tiles would be a nice fit. We would love to hear your input so we can share your comments with our blog readers.

On Friday we were able to showcase our Bamboo Subway Tiles and today we wanted to show a photo of our Bamboo Mosaic tiles in our Waterfall design. Same as our Bamboo subway tiles, our Bamboo mosaic tiles in the waterfall design come mesh mounted on an easy to install sheet. Follow the included installation instructions for an error free installation.

These tiles will provide a beautiful upgrade for any kitchen backsplash or accent wall with the rich look of wood. The upside is that with our bamboo mosaic and subway tiles you get both the beauty as well as the natural and sustainable properties of Bamboo right in your own home.

We are proud of this new line of bamboo tiles and we hope you too will consider our newest collection as the materials choice for your home.

I think we got caught talking about our new Bamboo Subway tiles and Bamboo Mosaic tiles too soon late last year. But we had to do some final testing and make the last product design modifications before they were ready for prime time. Now the wait is over (for us anyway) and we can proudly say that our new Kaguya Bamboo Subway tiles and Kaguya Bamboo Mosaic tiles in a Waterfall design are in stock and ready to go.

These products were more than a year in the making and went through quite a few design changes along the way. Over the past several months we had Bamboo tile samples strewn across the desks, tables, and floors throughout our offices which I suppose now that I can look back on the process was “the fun part”. We are all happy with the final product and we hope that you, our customers also will appreciate the time and effort that went in to making our Bamboo tiles a reality.

Both the Bamboo subway and mosaic waterfall tiles come in two colors – Takara which is a lighter more traditional color that is associated with Bamboo material, and Kansai, which is a darker, rich wood color Bamboo that we felt would look quite nice in a project setting. The bamboo tiles are mesh mounted for ease of installation and we encourage our customers to read the installation instructions prior to ordering.

We recommend our Kaguya Bamboo tiles for interior, dry applications in either residential or commercial environments. Our bamboo tiles are a perfect compliment for walls where hardwood floors have been installed in a room. The Takara and Kansai colors coordinate with most any color of wood flooring on the market other than the lighter natural color products.

Specifically, our Bamboo mosaic tiles are a wonderful choice for kitchen backsplashes, accent walls, facing for a wet bar, or wall covering for a bathroom (outside of the shower) wall or hallway wall.

Please phone us anytime for questions or comments you might have about any of our products and we encourage you to leave a comment with your thoughts on our new Bamboo tiles.

The factory where many of our glass tiles are made has recently made a change in how they manufacture some of their products. Instead of purchasing new raw materials from a glass maker for the production of these glass tiles, they have put in place a program in their community where they now have access to a large supply of industrial waste glass which they collect on a regular basis to re-purpose and use to make many of our glass mosaic tiles collections.

The tiles where this change has been made are the Dewdrops, GlassBlends, and Cobbletones glass mosaic tile lines which are now made from post-industrial glass content and they are the newest additions to our recycled glass mosaic tile line-up. With customers seeking out more green products in their home remodeling and renovation projects we are always seeking to offer more choices in green products made for the home.

Order samples of any of our recycled glass mosaic tiles which already included our Kawaii collection and we are now proud to add the Dewdrops, GlassBlends, and Cobbletones collections to this list.

Our new Bamboo tiles arrived yesterday and we are busy packing them away, preparing samples and getting the product ready to present on our website. The colors came out absolutely beautiful and the wait was well worth it. We will be introducing two new styles of Bamboo with both styles offered in two distinct colors.

Give us a little bit more time to get our act together and we will post pictures when the product is just about ready for prime time. We think you will agree when you see the new photos that the wait was definitely worth it.

Thank you for your patience and we appreciate all of the customers who trust us and support us by using our products on their remodeling and renovation projects.