After staring at the tiles for 30 seconds I found the pattern (4 aligned rows followed by an offset row), but… why the hell would you lay these out like that? It looks so jumbled.
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I find it interesting that the post itself has mostly upvotes, yet every comment I’ve made explaining why I don’t like it is downvoted
You managed to mildly infuriate a bunch of people with the pettiness of this gripe 😁
This is done intentionally, and repeats further throughout the installation. The main reason is it prevents long runs of grout lines. The installation will be stronger, and there’s no need for an expansion joint. Additionally, it’s harder to see if the grout joint shifts one direction or the other over a long run.
I don’t think it need to be done every fifth tile though- that’s a design choice by the installer.
It can also be the same reason the carpet patterns in casinos is a bit off, designed to irritate slightly so your head stays up and you focus on the stores more.
have u considered maybe some things in life simple and not a conspiracy?
It’s 2026, we no longer have the luxury of assuming this.
The casino thing isn’t supposition, it’s well documented. It’s not entirely unreasonable to think it may be used elsewhere.
You also think supermarkets don’t use the layout to manipulate you, hmm?
I’m generally with you on how people too easily come up with and believe in conspiracy theories.
But casinos are pretty famous for considering details like color schemes to find what is most profitable. If there’s one type of place that’s likely to put a lot of thought into carpet design, it’s a casino.
Not saying I simply believe what they say, but I’m not going to quickly write it off either.
The every fifth tile is what I have an issue with, tiles laid out at half-intervals or quarter-intervals on every row are common and perfectly fine. The chunk of 4 aligned tiles is very unpleasant to look at imo.
i dunno, look at something else?
many things in life are worth outrage. no need to go invent something.
Well, I wouldn’t say I’m outraged by it, given the community I posted it in. I’m not foaming at the mouth, I find the arrangement unpleasant and unnecessarily odd. Am I not allowed to think so?
The only thing I can think of is, maybe there used to be displays or kiosks there, and this actually created an illusion of uniformity when The offset rows were obstructed.
Yeah, I think that’s definitely what happened. Probably wasn’t possible to keep the pattern right, you’d end up with something that looked even weirder, so they went with this.
Maybe without such a pattern it become one big of the same thing. All lines are connected. And you might no longer see depth very well and get nauseous.
Why? There’s a pattern…
The pattern is stupid.
Person A is fine with a given tessellation. Person B hates it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellation
Now I’m kind of curious whether people have radically different preferences on the aesthetic appeal of different tessellations. I kind of always vaguely assumed that people tended to more-or-less find the same things appealing.
I’m kind of a sucker for hexagonal Spanish Revival terracotta tiles, but I lived near some places that used them, so maybe that’s specific to me. I have pleasant memories of walking on bare feet over shaded patios with them. Also, they aren’t the easiest thing to clean or the best thing to hide dirt or avoid damage (you can crack 'em). Or the cheapest.
I’m down with the look, but cleaning does look like it’d be a nightmare.
I don’t care for many types of parquet flooring patterns done in wood, especially basket weave, and to a lesser extent, herringbone.
This bothers me in a way flooring doesn’t usually.
This is an airport, isn’t it?
Oklahoma City.
It’s a path, you need to follow it to discover a new dimension.
This might have been done to allow “get right” points. If this is down a long aisle or corridor that wasnt built perfectly straight or parrallel(or various other reasons), the break in the pattern allows for adjustments that would otherwise be highly visible if it was one continuous pattern.
The pattern doesn’t go on for terribly long (you can see a break in the pattern towards the left of the photo, where there is actually a set of 3 aligned rows instead of 4).
They could have accomplished the same thing in a more uniform way by placing the tiles in the standard half-interval or quarter-interval pattern across all of them. The only thing that makes any sense to me is that it’s quicker/ faster to align the tiles than it is to offset them, but they couldn’t have them aligned the whole way for the reasons you outlined.
My best guess: They had to do some work below the tiles in that section and just filled out in close enough.
Nah that’s the actual pattern, you can see it repeat as you look left and right
