The 2025 Forecast: We’re Going All In

We’ve barely stepped foot into the new year but already design vanguards are setting the tone for 2025. First take: The most eye-catching spaces are looking bold, with big commitments to material and color. But forget the comically bright colorants of yesteryear, we’re seeing a touch of Mother Earth’s mysterious side with natural pigments in a range of edenic hues — plums, tobacco, fern and fawn-like neutrals. Making your statement need not require a brave tone, say our experts, it’s enough to double down on your preferred tile or natural stone. The point is, find something to be passionate about and go all the way.

Tile and stone, often relegated to the wings, is showing off main character energy, cladding not just full walls, but floors and ceilings, too this year. The idea: when it’s this good, why stop short?

Choosing a stone or tile thrills even the most seasoned design professional — the natural variations in earth-wrought materials bring joy to the process of both moodboarding, shopping and installation. (Rare that installed tile or stone doesn’t elicit a gasp by designer and homeowner alike — there’s nothing like it.) No wonder so many of the most memorable spaces we’re seeing these days are drawing on these materials for more than just foundational elements like flooring and surfaces or pretty details like backsplashes and niches.

Two of tile’s most soulful proponents, designers Gillian Segal in Vancouver and Cara Woodhouse in NYC, are here to share their inventive applications, convention-defying design ideas, and admirably open-minded point of view on why tile and stone should be just about anywhere you can imagine it and even a bunch of places you can’t… yet. Twenty-twenty-five is a fresh start, let’s start looking like it.

1. The Slab Effect

“Stone! I’m completely in awe of it,” gushes Woodhouse. “When I go to a stone yard or a slab gallery, it takes my breath away, every time. I’m drawn to stone like how people are drawn to a body of water.” The designer, who works on residential and commercial projects, furniture, and accessories, and is in the throes of creating a dreamy Long Island vacation rental filled with ingenious design flexes.

“Slab stone is everything for me, I use it everywhere I can,” she says. With these big stone expanses, she explains, “the colors, the graphics, they pop. There are no grout lines to interrupt the beauty.”

Woodhouse encourages her design clients to say yes to slabs nearly anywhere the budget allows, “It’s literally art. It can be a focal point, or it can bring a feeling of Zen,” she explains. “There’s so much that it offers to a space.”

2. Connecting Spaces

In Vancouver, designer Gillian Segal is renovating a new family home and is reconciling her own distinct style with a 1990s build that was less clear in its vision. To do so, she’s picking an Ann Sacks terra cotta-colored cement tile for nearly two thirds of the main level of the house, eschewing wood floors for this bolder take. “The choice of a stone throughline will make the floorplan really flow,” she reports, plus “it makes the house feel more contemporary than its architecture originally implied.”

Natural and engineered wood is the de facto choice for home flooring making it easy to overlook. Ramping up to tile or stone assures an impactful aesthetic for the value. And it does the heavy lifting in one ineffable category: creating atmosphere. “Vancouver is gray and rainy and so I chose a material that will bring me joy,” the designer explains. “This tile is super textural, rich, warm and sunny. It makes me think of a magical time I once spent in Italy. When we’re stuck inside, I’m just going to pretend I’m there.”

3. Kitchen—But Make it Different

A tile backsplash? That’s just a starting point for tile in the kitchen. High-end designers today are running tile up full walls, a move commonly seen in older American houses and throughout Northern Europe, the result feeling both luxe and utilitarian: a posh working kitchen. The evolution of that idea is to use fine slab stone to sheath the walls and, for an extra modern approach, installing the same stone for countertops. But that’s not all….

Both Segal and Woodhouse are using tile and stone for range hoods. Segal turned to zellige for a recent project, uniting the range hood and entire kitchen wall with that handmade tile in a glossy neutral tone, the effect being bold and modern but without a wisp of trendiness.

4. What Details Do

Stone is commonplace in the bathroom for sheathing shower walls and floors, but recently vanities and sinks wrought from stone have come roaring back into fashion.

“With a single stone, there are so many different ways to go — you could create something super sleep, classic, contemporary, and all this depends on the thickness of the surface, the style of edge, and the texture, such as honed, high-gloss polished, or leathered. To me, texture has its own energetic values.”

5. The Full Dip

Drenching a full room — walls, ceilings and so on — in a single color has long been an effective designer strategy. “It’s an immersive feeling,” says Segal who frequently employs this. “And there’s a feeling of luxury that comes with that.” That confidence nudged her to do the same stone. (She’s at work on a powder room with a checkerboard of stone tile (Old World Stone field tiles in Corton Beige limestone and Calacatta) for the floor and walls.

Terrazzo, impactful in pattern and easy on the eyes is a favorite material for this, amplifying any space it touches.

6. Sometimes One's Not Enough

Even beyond making a space with help from a singular fantastic stone or tile is layering a room with two or more. “I don’t love things overly matchy,” says Segal, whose own kitchen island has an island mixing stones. The layering keeps this precious and hefty material from feeling too serious. To get homeowners on board, Segal tells them: “Look to Europe. An idea that may seem crazy here has often been employed in Europe for hundreds of years, now worn and with a patina and beautiful.”