Designing for High-Traffic Public Spaces
Public areas are the backbone of the hotel experience, and they endure the most demanding conditions: the constant flow of guests, rolling luggage, cleaning equipment, and exposure to food and beverage service. Yet these are also the spaces where designers are expected to make the strongest visual impact.
Crossville porcelain tile and porcelain panels allow designers to create statement lobbies, refined lounges, elevated coffee bars, and resilient elevator corridors without sacrificing beauty for durability. Large porcelain tile panels bring drama and scale to feature walls. Coordinating field tile formats ground the design with the look of stone, concrete, metal, or wood—materials that communicate luxury but may not hold up to commercial traffic in their natural form. With porcelain, designers can deliver the look they want with none of the compromise.
Guest Rooms That Balance Luxury and Longevity
Guest rooms have shifted decisively toward cleaner, more contemporary surface materials. Porcelain tile has become a go-to solution for these spaces because it delivers the look designers want with the performance owners require. Floors remain beautiful even with constant turnover. Bathrooms look elevated and bright, with tile that resists moisture, stains, and heavy cleaning cycles. Porcelain panels create spa-like shower walls and sophisticated vanities that mimic natural stone without the risk of etching or discoloration.
Designers are also using tile in unexpected ways—focal headboard walls, built-in millwork accents, and balcony flooring that carries the interior design language outdoors. The result is a guest room experience that feels cohesive, curated, and enduring.
Bringing the Design Story Outdoors
Outdoor amenities are central to the hospitality experience, and those spaces demand materials that perform beautifully in every climate. Crossville’s exterior porcelain pavers for patios and decks, along with porcelain tile for pool waterlines and vertical features, offer the durability, easy maintenance, and elevated aesthetics needed for terraces, pool decks, rooftop lounges, and dining patios.
For outdoor flooring, Crossville’s exterior pavers provide the technical performance required for high-traffic environments and high-use amenity spaces. Their dense, moisture-resistant structure makes them easy to clean and helps reduce issues associated with mold, moss, algae, and staining, while the exterior finishes offer the enhanced traction needed for poolside areas and wet conditions.
Many Crossville porcelain tile collections offer coordinating interior and exterior tiles, allowing designers to maintain a unified material palette across an entire property. This continuity is especially valuable in hospitality settings where outdoor areas function as extensions of lobbies, restaurants, lounges, and spa amenities. Coordinating surfaces ensure that transitions feel seamless, intentional, and visually cohesive—strengthening the overall guest experience and reinforcing brand identity.
Most Crossville tiles can be used outdoors, but these collections offer coordinating exterior finish tiles for enhanced traction underfoot.
Laminam® Porcelain Panels: Elegant Large-Scale Looks, Efficient Renovations
Porcelain panels have become one of the most valuable tools in hospitality renovation and new construction alike. Their large-scale format delivers the clean, seamless surfaces designers want today, while their thin profile makes them ideal for efficient tile over tile installations in active hotels. By eliminating the need to shut down rooms or tear out existing finishes, spaces can be renovated quickly and relatively quietly—avoiding the mess, cost, and downtime that come with demolition.
These expansive panels create the elegant, uninterrupted, and refined visual impact of slab surfaces, without the maintenance concerns associated with materials that aren’t impervious. Whether used to refresh existing spaces or bring a modern aesthetic to a new build, porcelain panels offer a high-performance solution that aligns beauty, durability, and project timelines in a way few materials can.
Porcelain panels continue to reshape the way hospitality spaces approach renovation, especially in active hotels where downtime and disruption must be kept to a minimum. Their large-scale format creates expansive, seamless surfaces that designers love, while their thin profile enables tile-over-tile installations that traditional materials simply can’t match. This combination of scale and efficiency has made porcelain panels a go-to solution for guest bath refreshes, lobby updates, corridors, elevator surrounds, and spa areas.
Tile over tile installation eliminates the most disruptive parts of renovation: demolition, debris, extended room closures, and the dust and noise that travel quickly through an operating hotel. As outlined in this tile-over-tile white paper, avoiding the removal of existing finishes dramatically reduces labor, keeps costs in check, and minimizes construction waste — a major advantage for both sustainability and scheduling. It also allows facilities to stay operational with far less interruption, a critical factor in hospitality environments that can’t afford to take large blocks of rooms offline.
Because panels are offered in both 3 mm (for walls) and 5.6 mm (for floors and walls), design teams can specify true large-scale surfaces while keeping transitions, floor height, and wall thickness manageable. A single 1 x 3-meter panel can cover more than 32 square feet, resulting in a dramatically clean visual field with fewer grout joints (up to 95% less!), allowing for a cleaner, more seamless aesthetic—one of the defining advantages of large-format porcelain panels in hospitality design.
When installed over existing tile, these panels rely on proper substrate evaluation and qualified installers, but once in place, they deliver durable, easy-to-maintain surfaces that require no sealing, resist staining, and support the rigorous cleaning cycles common in hospitality.
Whether refreshing aging guest baths without demolition, creating uninterrupted lobby feature walls, or bringing a modern aesthetic to outdated corridors, porcelain panels offer a renovation pathway that aligns beauty, performance, and efficiency. They deliver the beauty and contemporary feel of slab surfaces with the technical advantages of impervious porcelain, all while supporting the timelines and operational realities. (Download the tile over tile white paper here.)
Back-of-House Performance With Cross-Tread®
Back-of-house spaces demand a surface material that can keep up with constant movement, moisture, cleaning cycles, and heavy equipment. That’s where Cross-Tread® stands apart. Developed in collaboration with restaurant industry experts, Cross-Tread delivers enhanced traction under challenging conditions, addressing the moisture and grease concerns that are common in commercial kitchens, prep areas, laundry rooms, and service corridors.
Unlike traditional quarry tile, Cross-Tread is a pure, through-body porcelain solution with technical advantages baked into the product—not applied afterward. The textured surface is integral to the tile, so it cannot wear down over time, and the porcelain body resists microbial growth, heavy-duty cleaners, and long-term exposure to demanding environments. This means facilities get long-lasting performance without waxing, sealing, or the high maintenance often associated with quarry installations.
Cross-Tread also brings aesthetic options that quarry tile simply can’t match. Available in nine Cross-Colors Mingles shades, it offers a broader palette for operators who want their back-of-house spaces—or open kitchens—to look as intentional as the front of the house. With its larger 8 x 8 size and slimmer grout joints, Cross-Tread achieves a cleaner, more contemporary appearance while still meeting the rigorous performance needs of staff-only areas.
There are cost efficiencies as well. Because Cross-Tread tiles are larger and more dimensionally precise, they use less epoxy grout than typical quarry tile — up to 30% – 50% less grout, which means less chance for mold and mildew. The tiles also weigh less, reducing freight costs, another advantage in both labor and materials.
With millions of square feet installed across major national brands over the last decade, Cross-Tread is a proven, high-performance, enhanced-traction solution trusted by operators who need surfaces that perform under the intense daily demands of commercial back-of-house environments. (Download the Cross-Tread white paper here.)
Sustainable Surfaces to Support Modern Hospitality Standards
Sustainability is a core consideration in hospitality design, shaping everything from brand standards to material selection. Designers are tasked with specifying surfaces that support healthier interiors, reduce long-term environmental impact, and provide credible documentation for LEED, WELL, and other certification pathways. Crossville has built its manufacturing program around those expectations, with verifiable practices that support both environmental responsibility and high-performance design.
Crossville’s U.S.-made porcelain tile is produced using processes that minimize waste, incorporate recycled materials, and filter and recirculate wastewater through our manufacturing plants to reduce overall water consumption—all part of a long-term commitment to reduce environmental impact at the manufacturing level. Crossville tile contains no VOCs and contributes to healthier indoor air quality, a key consideration in hospitality settings with continuous guest and staff occupancy. With no off-gassing and no required sealers or topical treatments, porcelain provides a stable, low-maintenance surface throughout its lifecycle.
Durability is also central to sustainable specification. Porcelain tile is inherently long-lasting, impervious, and resistant to moisture, staining, and repeated cleaning cycles—qualities that support lifecycle credits in LEED and align with the long-term operational expectations of hotels and resorts. A surface that performs for decades without replacement reduces material consumption, avoids unnecessary demolition, and supports a lower environmental footprint over time.
Crossville also offers six carbon-neutral tile collections, allowing designers to meet carbon-reduction goals without compromising on aesthetics or performance. These collections are paired with Crossville’s commitment to material transparency: every Crossville-manufactured tile product is supported by Health Product Declarations (HPDs) and Declare Labels, giving specifiers access to third-party-verified material health and ingredient disclosures. This level of transparency has become increasingly important as hospitality brands adopt more rigorous sustainability and wellness standards across their portfolios.
For hospitality teams focused on environmental responsibility, indoor air quality, wellness-driven design, and long-term operational efficiency, Crossville tile provides a comprehensive path forward—uniting durability, transparency, carbon-conscious options, and the elevated aesthetics designers expect from a commercial-grade porcelain surface.
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Crossville Hospitality Solutions
With stock in the USA ready to ship, contact us for current availabilities, and get your specification process underway by flipping through our Hospitality brochure or downloading the PDF version.
