Custom Tile Installation for Windermere Luxury Homes

Windermere is not a new construction town. The estates around the Butler Chain of Lakes went up over decades, many in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the owners renovating them are rarely chasing trends. They want work that matches the quality of the house they already have.

We are Luong Tile, a family-owned tile and flooring company serving Orlando and Central Florida for more than 20 years. Custom work in established estate homes is some of the most demanding work we take on, and some of the most satisfying. Here is what separates artisan tile work from production installation, and why the difference matters in a home like yours.

Production work and artisan work are different trades

Most tile installation in Central Florida is production work. A crew sets the same 12 by 24 inch porcelain in the same offset pattern in house after house, priced by the square foot and judged by speed. Nothing wrong with that in a new build where the goal is a clean, durable floor at a fair price.

Artisan work starts differently. Before we open a bag of thinset, we plan the layout on paper and dry-lay the field so you can see where every cut lands. We center patterns on sight lines, balance the cuts at opposite walls, and decide in advance where grout joints fall around niches, benches, and doorways. In a custom home, tile is not a commodity. It is finish carpentry in stone and porcelain.

Hand-laid mosaics

Sheet-mounted mosaic from a supply house goes up fast because the spacing decisions were made in a factory. Hand-laid mosaic is slower, and it shows. We set individual pieces to follow a drawn design: floral vines climbing an accent wall, a three-color hexagon blend that shifts tone across a shower pan, penny rounds tightening around a drain.

The payoff is a surface with no visible sheet lines and no mechanical repeats. Guests may not know why the wall reads as a piece of art rather than a product, but they notice. You can see a white marble vine mosaic and a tri-color hexagon shower pan among the projects in our gallery.

Book-matched marble looks, without the marble headaches

Book-matching, where two polished slabs open like the pages of a book so the veining mirrors itself, is one of the signatures of a high-end bath. Natural marble slab work is beautiful, but porcelain has caught up. Large-format porcelain panels, 24 by 48 inches and larger, now carry printed veining faithful enough for us to build the same mirrored effect on a shower wall or fireplace surround, with better stain and etch resistance than real marble.

The material is only half the job. The veins have to be sequenced panel to panel, cuts planned so the pattern flows through corners and around a niche instead of breaking at it, and outside edges mitered so a corner reads as solid stone. Panels that size also demand a very flat wall, within about 1/8 inch over 10 feet, because lippage that hides on a small tile is glaring across a four foot panel.

Borders, inlays, and transitions

Details like these quietly separate an estate home from a spec house. A herringbone field wrapped in a straight-lay border at the room's edge. A mosaic rug inlaid in a foyer floor. A listello band carrying a line around a bath at eye level. A polished metal profile finishing an outside corner instead of a bullnose.

Every one of those choices multiplies the cuts and the layout decisions, which is exactly why production crews avoid them. We build them into the plan from the first measurement, so a border lands as a full, even course instead of a sliver.

Substrate prep in older luxury homes

Established homes bring conditions that new construction does not. We regularly find original mud-set beds under 1990s floors, hairline cracks in slabs that have been settling for 30 years, and second-story wood subfloors that flex more than modern large-format tile can tolerate.

Prep is not glamorous, but it decides whether a floor lasts 30 years or cracks in three. Depending on the house, ours includes:

• Grinding old thinset and adhesive back to clean slab after demolition
• Flattening dips and crowns with self-leveling underlayment
• Crack isolation membrane over settled or hairline-cracked concrete
• Checking deflection on wood-framed floors and stiffening them before tile goes down
• Moisture testing before any natural stone is set

Showers deserve their own mention. Many older estate baths still have their original pan liners, and those have a service life. When we renovate a shower we rebuild the waterproofing to current standards with a bonded waterproof membrane, a properly sloped pre-pan, and a flood test before a single tile is set. The full list of what we do is on our services page.

Hand-painted and decorative murals

We also install hand-painted and decorative tile murals: Spanish-style ceramic scenes for a kitchen backsplash, an outdoor kitchen, a courtyard wall, or a pool bath. Mural work is unforgiving because every tile is a numbered piece of one picture and there are no spares. Layout has to be perfect before the first piece is set, and the surrounding field has to frame the art rather than crowd it. One of our favorites, a hand-painted Spanish mural of a rider on horseback with a traditional blue, green, and gold border, is in the gallery.

Why an estate home deserves a craftsman, not the cheapest bid

We will be straightforward about money. We are rarely the lowest bid on a Windermere project, and we are not trying to be.

Hand-laid mosaic, border, and inlay work takes several times the labor hours of a standard floor, and that shows up in the price. Large-format panel showers and murals are planned and priced as individual projects. We quote every job after we walk the space, because prep needs vary so much from house to house, especially older ones, and the estimate costs you nothing.

The cheapest bid usually saves money on the things you cannot see at the final walkthrough: flatness prep, membranes, flood tests, layout time. In a home on the Butler Chain, tearing out a failed shower two years from now costs far more than the gap between bids ever was. You get what you pay for in this trade, and in an estate home that math favors doing it once, properly.

We are licensed and insured, and we treat established homes with care, from floor protection on the way in to clean, straight grout lines on the way out. We serve Windermere and the surrounding communities, and we are glad to show you what our work looks like in person.

If you are planning a renovation in Windermere, call us at 407-538-1155 or reach us through our contact page. We will look at your plans, walk the space with you, and give you an honest quote for doing the work right.