Short answer: five products here are filed darker than grey. Three carry the Colour: Charcoal tag and sit in Charcoal tiles; two carry Colour: Black and sit in Black tiles. They are two groups only because the tag says so. Three of the five are Studio subway tiles at 75 × 300 mm — one charcoal, two black — and the other two are 300 × 600 / 600 × 600 mm porcelain from series whose greys are compared elsewhere. Three record Ceramic, two Porcelain. Three faces are gloss, one matt, one rough. Only one page calls itself "true black", and the page that says "near-black" is filed under charcoal.
| # | Product | Tag | Type | Size | Finish | Material | Colour words on the page |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Studio Charcoal Subway Tile | Charcoal | Subway | 75 × 300 mm | Gloss | Ceramic | "deep charcoal", "fine surface grain that softens the reflection" |
| 2 | Urban Graphite Concrete-Look Tile | Charcoal | Concrete-look | 300 × 600 / 600 × 600 mm | Matt | Porcelain | "deeper graphite", "refined matt surface" |
| 3 | Ridge Charcoal Stone-Look Tile | Charcoal | Stone-look | 300 × 600 / 600 × 600 mm | Rough | Porcelain | "near-black slate look", "rough face" |
| 4 | Studio Ink Subway Tile | Black | Subway | 75 × 300 mm | Gloss | Ceramic | "true black", "full gloss glaze" |
| 5 | Studio Ink Wave Subway Tile | Black | Subway | 75 × 300 mm | Gloss | Ceramic | "black", "rippled face" |
1. Why five, and where the line between charcoal and black falls
Three products carry the Colour: Charcoal tag in the site's product feed and Charcoal tiles lists the same three; two carry Colour: Black and Black tiles lists those two. The feed and the collection pages agree. Between them sit the seventeen greys of Grey tiles: 17 greys compared, and the charcoal collection page says of its own three that charcoal "is the least uniform of the dark groups: gloss, matt and rough textured faces all appear in it".
The line between the two tags is not where the words fall. The one page that writes "near-black" — Ridge Charcoal, "a near-black slate look with a rough face" — is filed under charcoal. The two black pages describe themselves differently from each other: Studio Ink is "a true black subway tile with a full gloss glaze", Studio Ink Wave "a black subway tile with a rippled face". Whether a near-black rough porcelain reads darker or lighter than a true-black gloss glaze in a room is a question about the light, and the pages do not answer it; they record a tag.
2. What each page says about its dark
Five descriptions, five different words for the colour. Studio Charcoal is "deep charcoal"; Urban Graphite a "deeper graphite" — the page lists Pearl, Mist and Graphite as its Colour options without saying deeper than which; Ridge Charcoal "near-black"; Studio Ink "true black"; Studio Ink Wave "black". None of the five names a temperature. The word warm does not appear on any of the five pages, and nor does cool, so this guide does not supply one. A dark surface is hard for a photograph: a camera may lift the shadows or crush them, so what you see may be exposure as much as colour. Check a sample.
What the pages do describe, on four of the five, is what the surface does with light. Studio Charcoal has "a fine surface grain that softens the reflection". Studio Ink has "a full gloss glaze". Studio Ink Wave has "a rippled face, so the gloss breaks into highlights rather than a flat sheet". Urban Graphite keeps "a refined matt surface". The fifth, Ridge Charcoal, describes the figure instead: a "slate look" with a "rough face". The black collection page puts the same point another way: black under a reflective glaze "behaves less like a colour and more like a dark mirror".
3. Three gloss, one matt, one rough
The Finish row reads Gloss on the three subway tiles, Matt on Urban Graphite and Rough on Ridge Charcoal. None of the five names a second finish, so unlike seven of the whites and five of the greys there is no "or" to choose between. The three gloss faces are the three that record Ceramic; the matt and rough faces are the two that record Porcelain. Porcelain, ceramic, rectified, matt, gloss explains what each of those rows records.
Two of the three gloss faces are flat and one is not. Studio Charcoal and Studio Ink both carry a Profile row reading Flat. Studio Ink Wave's Profile row reads Wave, and its Style row "Subway, Wave", so it is the one dark face here with a moulded relief. Ridge Charcoal's roughness is a finish, not a profile: the page records Rough on the Finish line and no Profile row.
4. What formats are recorded
Three sizes, in two groups. The three subway tiles record 75 × 300 mm at 8 mm thick. Urban Graphite and Ridge Charcoal each record two formats, 300 × 600 mm and 600 × 600 mm, at 10 mm thick, and since 5 October 2026 those two pages let you choose between them, so the order is placed for the format you pick. There is no dark tile here at 600 × 1200 mm, no dark 100 × 300 mm subway tile, and no dark mosaic sheet; the one dark-ish sheet on the site, Studio Graphite Strip, is tagged grey and counted with the seventeen.
The black collection page says it plainly: "The black tiles currently in the range are gloss subway shapes at 75 × 300 mm." A matt black, a black floor-format tile or a black sheet is not something this site records today. Subway tile sizes sets the 75 × 300 mm format beside the 100 × 300 mm one, and Subway tile layouts: 8 patterns is where a 75 × 300 mm face, dark or light, gets laid out.
5. Which greys and whites each dark sits next to
All five come from a series that also carries a grey, and three from a series that carries a white. That makes the pairs easy to reason about: same series, different colour row — with the size, finish and profile rows still to be read, because a series does not hold them constant.
Studio. Studio Charcoal, Studio Ink and Studio Ink Wave are three of the eleven faces in Subway tiles: 11 faces compared. Studio Ink, 75 × 300 mm gloss with Profile: Flat, has Studio Greige in grey at the same size, finish and profile; the white at that size, Studio Flat, records "Gloss or matt" and no Profile row. Studio Ink Wave's rippled face is one of five in Wave tiles — Studio Wave and Studio Crest Wave in white, Studio Cloud Wave in grey, Studio Sage Wave in green — and this is the only dark one. A rippled glaze is not the same thing as zellige: Zellige tiles: what zellige is, and why the five wave tiles here are not explains why none of the five is. Studio Charcoal, with its "fine surface grain", is the one page of the five that describes the grain of its glaze. All three Studio darks are also listed in Kitchen splashback tiles, and the kitchen splashback formats guide sets them beside the other eight subway faces in that collection.
Urban. Urban Graphite is the one of three concrete-look faces the page calls "deeper", beside Urban Mist (grey) and Urban Pearl (beige); the page lists all three as Colour options, and Concrete-look tiles: 6 faces compared takes the series with its Quarry neighbours. Ridge. Ridge Charcoal is the one of three rough stone-look faces called "near-black", beside Ridge Slate ("dark slate look") and Ridge Grey ("mid-grey slate look"); all three are in Stone-look tiles: 6 faces compared, and all three record Rough on the Finish line. Slate tiles or slate look? covers what "slate look" means on the three: their Material row reads Porcelain, not slate.
No series here carries a dark and a white in the same large format: the two 600 × 600 mm darks belong to Urban and Ridge, and neither series has a white. A dark subway tile and a white one from the same Studio series were never drawn as a pair either — the pages record nothing about how any two look together.
6. How do you check a dark tile in your own light?
All five carry a Sample piece option beside the standard purchase unit. A dark gloss face shows the room before it shows itself: the black collection page's line about a dark mirror is the thing to test. Hold the sample where the light source will be behind you, then where it will be in front, and see whether you are looking at a tile or a window. The other two record a different kind of surface — Urban Graphite's "refined matt surface" and Ridge Charcoal's "rough face" — and a sample in the room's own light is where that difference shows.
If you are choosing between the charcoal and a black, hold them together rather than one after the other; side by side is the comparison the eye does well. Tile samples explains how ordering works and how to compare samples at home covers what to write down. With a dark tile the joint is the opposite problem from a white: a pale grout draws the grid, a dark one hides it, and a dried sample joint against a chart is where that is seen. What no sample settles is the batch: every page states that production batches can vary.
Questions people ask
Are there any matt black tiles here?
No. The two tiles tagged black are both gloss. The only matt dark is Urban Graphite, tagged charcoal, which the page calls "deeper graphite"; the only rough one is Ridge Charcoal, which the page calls "near-black".
Which is the darkest tile on the site?
The pages do not rank them. Studio Ink is the only one called "true black"; Ridge Charcoal is "near-black"; the other three are "black", "deep charcoal" and "deeper graphite". Which reads darkest in a room depends on the finish as much as the colour, and that is a sample question.
Are there black floor tiles or black mosaic tiles?
Not recorded here. The two black pages are 75 × 300 mm subway tiles, and the only 600 × 600 mm darks are the two charcoal porcelains. The format is recorded; where a tile may be laid is not something this guide reads off a description, and is settled by your installer or specifier.
Where these facts come from
Every count above was produced on 21 September 2026 by a script that read the product feed at /products.json, cross-checked it against Charcoal tiles and Black tiles, then read the five product pages in turn: the Size, Thickness, Finish and Profile rows, the Product type, Style and Material rows in the specifications panel, the Colour options list, and the opening description sentence. Words in quotation marks are the product page's or collection page's own wording, copied as written; the counts outside them are tallies of those rows; anything else outside quotation marks is the author's observation, not a recorded fact. Nothing here is a performance claim or a statement of where a tile belongs. A phrase such as "for high-contrast splashbacks" in a supplier's description is the supplier's wording, not a record of suitability, and this guide does not infer where a tile may be laid from a colour or a description; that is settled by your installer or specifier. Supplier documentation changes, so read the page on the day you order, and confirm the specification your project needs with the responsible installer.
Where this guide sits: Where to start sets out the order the guides follow.
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