Cersaie 2026: Six Tile Shifts That Change Specification, Not Just Style
Cersaie 2026 showed ceramic moving beyond a neutral finish toward a more active architectural surface. Across the Bologna fair, manufacturers used saturated colour, relief, digital printing, stone effects, large slabs and hand decoration to change how tile manages scale, light and continuity. The useful question is not which trend is newest, but what each asks from specification and installation.
1. Colour becomes a planning tool
Burgundy, brown, terracotta, red and yellow appeared as full architectural palettes rather than occasional accents. Atlas Concorde’s Vivia uses vivid glazed tones, while other collections build families of related densities. Strong colour can identify a wet zone, threshold or wall plane, but batch variation and future replacement need to be considered early when the hue carries the room.
2. Green connects colour with material memory
Greens ranged from dark mineral tones to pale sage and translucent onyx effects. Gardenia Ariana pairs glossy fields with fluted pieces, while Sartoria’s Plinth combines green with three-dimensional texture. The result changes under daylight and grazing artificial light, making sample review at the project site more useful than judging a small image alone.
3. Relief changes the work of light
Several collections use real or apparent depth. Marca Corona mixes matte backgrounds with glossy tesserae; Moooi Ceramic Surfaces and ABK use a digitally applied relief; Appiani creates an illusion that looks dimensional while remaining flat to the touch. Each condition carries different consequences for grout lines, cleaning and placement near hand contact.
4. Nature is reproduced, then edited
Porcelain continues to translate slate, lava, limestone, marble and onyx, but the emphasis is shifting from simple imitation to controlled variation. Flaviker’s Magma and Verde’s Essenziale use colour and depth to suggest geological irregularity. Del Conca’s Marble Boutique extends the approach through multiple finishes and slabs up to 48 by 110 inches. The visual effect does not replace a technical comparison of wear, slip, thickness and repair.
5. Large format moves beyond the floor
Large-format material is now being coordinated across walls, islands, counters and furniture-scale elements. ANSI defined large-format tile in 2025 as tile with at least one facial dimension of 23 inches or more. Solaris by Cotto D’Este reaches formats up to 24 by 128 inches. Fewer joints create continuity, but substrate tolerance, handling and cutting become more demanding.
6. Digital precision meets the hand-painted mark
Decorative collections ranged from cold digital printing and laser engraving to hand painting. Ceramica Bardelli’s Tulipani and Searcus demonstrate controlled repetition, while Kengo Kuma’s Rain collection for Ceramica Francesco De Maio keeps the movement of the hand visible. The choice is not between old and new technology; it is between predictable modules and accepted variation, each requiring a different layout strategy.
Credits
Products and manufacturers are identified in the image captions. Cersaie 2026 was held in Bologna at the end of September, bringing together ceramic, surface and bathroom-furnishing manufacturers. Image rights belong to their respective owners.
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
The pressure behind the Cersaie collections is not simply the demand for new colours. Ceramic manufacturers are being asked to make one surface perform as image, texture, durable finish and, increasingly, a continuous layer across floors, walls, counters and furniture. The design response is greater control: richer glazes, digitally registered relief, deeper printing and larger formats that reduce visible joints. For the user, these tools can produce calmer continuity or stronger orientation, but they also magnify specification errors. A convincing stone image does not make porcelain behave like stone, and a visually seamless slab still requires movement joints, flat substrates, handling equipment and a repair strategy. Relief can animate grazing light yet collect dirt in demanding locations; saturated colour can organise a room but makes later replacement batches more visible. Hand-painted variation offers a different value from digitally repeatable precision, and the two should not be judged by the same expectation of uniformity. The practical lesson is to select tile from the conditions of use outward: slip resistance, cleaning, edge detail, module, installer capability and spare stock should be resolved before the image becomes the specification.
