I agree with your cousin. The larger tiles would look great in a large bathroom and in your foyer, but too large for your narrow bathroom and hallway. I'd stick to 12x12 for your job. The 12 x 12 will look good in your hallway and foyer, as well.

Here is a photo of a hall bath of mine - with 12" tiles.

We have the small hex tiles in our hall bath. I'm not sure that it makes it look bigger though. Actually I'm not sure that the room is even 5 x 8.

Actually, I think a larger tile expands the space, especially if done on the diagonal.

I think an important part of the equation is how the bath relates to the foyer and hallway that are also going to be tiled, and if you think it is important that the tile layout flows from one room to the next.

You may want to layout the tile in the primary areas first and see what happens if you just continue the layout into the bath. It may not be an ideal layout for the bath in isolation, but the bath is secondary to the hallway and foyer. If it doesn't work to layout the tile in a continuous grid over all three areas (say it leaves a weird sliver of tile along one wall of the bathroom), what is often done is to turn the tile on the diagonal and lay it out in a configuration that is best for the bathroom.

Actually the less lines that intersect the floor, generally speaking, the larger it looks. (Mosaic is not really included here because it is so small that it looks like one large pattern, not individual tiles). Think about what looks bigger. A square divided into four, or into 9 or into 16? An 18" tile could lay out really nicely in that bathroom, but you have to do it on paper first (All three areas).

If 18" doesn't seem to work you could try 12" in the same tile or try cutting the 18" into 9" (or into 12" but there would be a Lot of waste doing this and I wouldn't unless it was inexpensive tile).

Overall my bathroom is bigger but the actual tiled floor space is 5-1/2 ft wide. We chose to use 18x18 tiles (the biggest size available at the time) on the diagonal. The previous tiles were 8x8 stacked in a grid. Sorry I don't have a picture of that floor so you could see the difference but believe me, the new bigger tiles on the diagonal truly do make the space look larger.
My daughter is about to redo her hall bath which is 67" x76". She was going to use 12x24 tile for both the floor and tub/shower surround but the tiler told her it would look even better if she used 24x24 tiles on the floor. The 24x24's will be in a grid.
Here is a shot of my bathroom tiles.

12 x 24

{{!gwi}}

I love the pics. Every example would look 100% better than what I have so I guess I will just go to shop and follow my gut. The foyer is a seperate area between the living room and kitchen. It is approx 4 x 10. I have asked my son to draw it to scale for me today before I I go shopping for tile.

Thank you all so very much!

I have to say that I do like the look of the 18x18 tiles on badgergals floor. I thought that they would be too big in a small scale bathroom, but I think if you can get at least two whole tiles in the room, along with the shorter cut pieces, those will look good.

badgergal, I love your floor. That's what I want!!! And really, since the diagonal width of 18" tile is wider (sorry, don't know the answer to that in my head), there isn't room for two full tiles across the width of the room. And yet, it looks awesome.

My recently redone 6x8 bath. Had small tiles before and it was a bear to keep the grout clean. This 18x18 on the diagonal opened up the room and is a breeze to keep sparkling.

We used large tiles (12x24?) in our tiny MB (~5x7), and 12x12 tiles in our narrow (4' wide?) guest bathroom, and they do seem to help open up the rooms.

MB:

Guest Bathroom:

Cut some cardboard into different sizes and play around with it. We did 12" diagonal is a small bathroom and it does seem to make it look bigger.

This bath was updated 4 years ago. 12 x 12 marble tile was laid on a diagonal. Not only will a diagonal help visually enlarge a small space, it will better disguise any out-of-square condition. We used the same tile for baseboard.

Here is a link that might be useful: Hall/Guest Bathroom

Late to the party, but here is the downstairs bath after the floor was redone as part of the remodel last year. I was intrigued as I'm dealing with another similar sized bath and was considering large scale planks. I noticed only the one other example of very small tile.

This is basketweave, mixed Carrera/Nero. I don't know if the pattern expands or shrinks the space. The width is about six feet in total, and as shown, 52 inches wide.

This post was edited by gooster on Wed, Jan 1, 14 at 22:26

I think mosaic reads as an overall pattern and tends to expand floorspace if it is one-or two-color.