As much as possible, I think it looks best to either have full rows or at least have the cut rows be even in size. It sounds like if your top row of tile is a full 12", you'd be left with a 7 1/2" row at the bottom. I'd try to avoid that because the visual weight of the larger rows of tile would accentuate the difference in size. If you're committed on the locations of niches and metal profiles already, my preference would be to go with even size rows of 9 3/4" at the very top and bottom. My second choice would be to put a 7 1/2" row at the top and have the rest of the rows be full 12" tiles. We laid out several options on our floor before finalizing our tile pattern. By adjusting the location of our accent row, we were able to to go with full 12" rows below and one 10 1/2" row above.

Chris I have posted this many times on other GW forums - DalTile Brazilian slate - Porcelain tile - in Hopscotch pattern - This stuff is bullet proof & always looks nice reasonably priced and without the inherent issues slate typically has

ngng - I did what you suggested and cut some tiles out of paper. Excellent idea! Thank you :) Bill - I think you might be right. I tried filling in the rectangle with 6x6's and 4x4's and the 4x4's won out. But the bigger field tiles seemed to work fine elsewhere. I know this looks like a 5 year old did it... but it did help me a lot! (And no... these are not my colors.. just used for layout purposes.) Thanks!

The only "rule" is, is that new tile is likely to make old tile look old, used, and "wrong" in many people's eyes. ;)