In depthHow to choose shower wall panels
Wall panels are the one category here that is not a floor, and the decision they answer is a bathroom decision: tile the shower, or panel it. The range is a single product, the Berry Alloc Wall and Water panel, in five surfaces. Each panel is 600 mm wide and 2400 mm tall, 10.2 mm thick, a high-pressure laminate face on a seven-layer plywood core, listed as waterproof, with an interlocking system along the long edge, made in Belgium, with the manufacturer's lifetime warranty. Concrete, Cement and White Brooklyn Concrete are the three concrete looks from dark to pale; White Marble is the veined surface; Black Velvet the dark, matt one.
Tiling a shower means bedding small units in adhesive and grouting between them, and every grout line is a joint that has to be sealed, cleaned and, in time, raked out and redone. Panelling it means fixing a few large units to the wall and sealing the handful of joints where they meet, at the corners and around the valve and the shower head. That is the whole comparison. The high-pressure laminate face is the material of a hard-wearing worktop; it is wiped clean with a soft cloth and has no grout to discolour. Because there is no grout to cure, the enclosure is back in use far sooner than a tiled one.
What the panels depend on is the wall behind them and the sealing at their joints. A sound, flat wall takes them directly; sound, flat, firmly fixed tiles can often take them as well, which is why bathrooms are frequently re-done with panels rather than re-tiled, and a fitter judges that on site. A 2400 mm panel reaches floor to ceiling in most bathrooms without a horizontal joint, and 10.2 mm keeps the build-up small. The panels are not glued and grouted; they interlock and are fixed, and the joints, edges and cut-outs are sealed. That sealing is where a careful fitter earns the lifetime the warranty promises.
The surface is chosen with the floor. A concrete or cement panel over a matt grey floor reads as one material through the wet room; White Marble pairs with the marble-effect porcelain; Black Velvet makes a dark enclosure in a pale room. Two floors stay flat and dry alongside any of them: the matt marble-effect tiles and the concrete rigid vinyl tiles, both linked below, one laid by a tiler and one clicked together.
A lifetime warranty deserves a careful read, and so does what it sits alongside. The Consumer Rights Act's own quality term applies to the panels as it does to any goods, the remedies it gives are the buyer's regardless of the warranty, and a manufacturer's guarantee cannot reduce those statutory rights; all three are quoted below. What decides whether a panelled shower stays dry is not written in any of them: it is the sealing at the joints, and that is where the fitter's time goes.
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