Kitchen
Backsplash
in Los Angeles.

No. We do not fabricate or install countertops, and we are not a general contractor. Your fabricator handles the stone or quartz; we handle the tile that meets it. That split is the normal way a kitchen goes together, and it keeps the seam between the two trades clear. We're happy to talk directly with your fabricator about template dates, overhang, and where the backsplash should land. We've worked around plenty of existing counters too: the kit-kat kitchen we tiled was set against dark counters and oak cabinets that were already in place.

Backsplashes of every flavor: zellige, ceramic, porcelain, hand-painted ceramic. The work is tile-first. We come in for the surface that everyone in the room looks at, and we set it so it doesn't fight the cabinets, the counters, or the rest of the house.

• Tiled backsplashes, standard height or full wall
• Tiled kitchen floors
• Range hood surrounds and full-height treatments
• Porcelain slab installations, including mitered niches
• Demo and replacement of existing backsplashes of all types
• Coordination with your cabinet maker, countertop fabricator, and designer

Either. We source from local and national retailers and we've pulled material from Zia Tile and Bedrosians on real jobs, so we can steer you toward showrooms that actually stock what you're describing. We'll also install client-sourced tile without complaint. The one thing we ask is that you buy the whole kitchen in a single order and add extra to the count. Handmade tile shifts between production runs, and a reorder placed after demo will not match the wall you already started.

Zellige is handmade and irregular by design. Thickness varies tile to tile, faces are waved, and the glaze pooled differently in the kiln, so the finished wall catches light unevenly. That means lippage is a feature of the material, not a mistake, and any installer who promises you a dead-flat zellige wall either hasn't set it or is about to grind the edges off it. We set it tight, often a 1/16-inch joint or close to butted, and we blend from several boxes at once so a dark batch doesn't stack in one corner. You'll know what the wall is going to look like before we start.

Kit-kat, or finger mosaic, ships on mesh sheets, and the install lives or dies on the seams between sheets. Match the spacing across a seam to the spacing inside the sheet and the grid reads continuous; miss it and you get a visible line at every sheet seam that nobody can stop seeing. Long runs also drift out of level, so we run a line and check the sheet, not the wall. see the project

Flatness, and a lot of hands. The slabs we set in a modern LA kitchen were 6 feet by 11 feet, over 150 pounds each, and took four people to lift. Slab wants a flat substrate (the industry tolerance for large format is about 1/8 inch over 10 feet) because a small hump in the drywall reads as a shadow across the finished surface, so we check flatness before anything is ordered rather than after it's delivered. Mitered returns and mitered niches are where slab earns its money; they are also where a bad cut is permanent. see the project

On the floor, before anything goes on the wall. Hand-painted ceramic is bought by the pattern, so the pattern has to be laid out before the first tile goes up, and we dry-lay the field first. A repeat almost never divides evenly into the run you actually have, which means somebody decides where the partial tiles land. Better in advance than on the fly. Cuts belong at the ends and behind the range, not through the middle of the motif.

A backsplash is the last thing to go in and the first thing to get blamed, so sequencing is most of the job.

Counters go in before tile. The fabricator templates off finished, flat walls, so anything that changes wall thickness (new drywall, a slab backer) has to be done before they template. Once the stone is set, the tile sits on top of it with a soft joint at the seam, caulked to match the grout rather than grouted solid. That joint moves. Grout there cracks.

Cabinets set the field. Upper cabinet height decides whether the tile lands on a full course at the top or a sliver. If your cabinet maker hasn't hung the uppers yet, tell us. A half-inch decision made before the boxes go up saves a bad cut line you'd look at every day.

Electrical boxes need to end up flush with the new tile face, which means extenders once the wall comes forward. Worth settling with your electrician early, along with whether outlets run horizontal or hide under the cabinets, because that's the difference between a clean field and a wall full of holes.

Usually, yes, and we replace backsplashes of all types. Old tile comes off along with whatever thinset or mastic is stuck to the wall behind it. What's underneath decides the next step: sometimes the drywall survives and gets patched flat, sometimes it comes out and gets replaced. Tiling over an existing backsplash is possible but it pushes the wall forward, which changes how the tile meets the cabinets, the counter, and the electrical boxes. We'd rather open it up and see what we're working with.

Yes. Full-height treatments and range hood surrounds are part of what we do, and they're the most common upgrade we get asked about. They're also the most common place a layout goes sideways, so the wall gets set off the range centerline, not off the cabinet run and not off the corner, because the range is what your eye centers on.

The hood decides the order of operations. If the hood mounts over the tile, we tile first and the hood goes on after; if it's already hung, we cut to it. Either way, blocking for the hood bracket has to be in the wall before it closes up, so that conversation happens at the walkthrough, not the week of.

We don't publish a fixed number for kitchen tile, because a small backsplash and a full-height slab wall behind a range are not the same week of work. Scope drives it, and we'd rather give you a real schedule at the free consultation than a number designed to get us in the door. For reference on the bigger end of what we do, our bathroom remodels run one to four weeks depending on scope.

Send a few photos of the wall and tell us what you're picturing. The consultation is free, and Corey does the walkthrough himself, not a salesperson, not an estimator who never comes back. If you already have tile picked out, bring it. If you don't, we'll help you choose, and we'll tell you honestly what that material is going to do once it's on the wall.

All of our work is warrantied. Many of the products we install carry multi-year or lifetime manufacturer warranties on top of that.

We're based in Northeast Los Angeles and work within roughly a 50-mile radius. That covers Highland Park, Eagle Rock, Glassell Park, Mount Washington, Atwater Village, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, and Echo Park close to home, and reaches Pasadena, South Pasadena, Altadena, Glendale, Burbank, Sierra Madre, San Marino, Alhambra, Monrovia, and Arcadia, with work out west as far as Malibu.

Slow Hand has been at this since 2020 and has finished 120-plus jobs.