Meet Cricket: Our New Oct-and-Dot Peel-and-Stick Floor Tile

I’ve loved the octagon-and-dot tile pattern for as long as I can remember. It manages to feel grand and understated at the same time, which is a hard balance to strike. So today is a good day: we’re launching Cricket, our new oct-and-dot peel-and-stick floor tile, part of the Chris Loves Julia x FloorPops collection. It’s the classic marble look, minus the marble price and the grout!

Shop early and get Cricket for 20% off + free shipping when you spend $100 using code: CRICKET

A rendering visualizing the new Cricket flooring in our entryway

But first, let me tell you why this pattern is worth the fuss.

The name is about as literal as it gets: octagon tiles, with a small square—the “dot”—tucked into the gap where their corners meet. (Shh…I actually didn’t know it had a name for the longest time.)

And that little dot is the whole trick. Without it, you just have a floor. With it, you have the detail that’s been showing up in beautiful old homes for centuries—from French châteaus to English manor homes, and just about every Victorian entryway. Look it up, and you’ll find it in grand European foyers and the marble lobbies of old buildings, always the same move: a field of octagons, a dot marking every seam.

A rendering visualizing the new flooring paired with our wallpaper in a moody modern traditional laundry room

That’s probably why it feels familiar the moment you see it. It doesn’t read as trendy—it reads as though it’s always been there. Or maybe you recognize it from a small version of it in our own mudroom, or the large scale we put in our bathroom last year. It made those rooms feel settled, like the house came with them.

What Cricket actually looks like

Cricket is a peel-and-stick tile made to look like a marble oct-and-dot floor. So when I say “marble,” I mean the look.

And the look is good. The white octagons aren’t flat or printed-looking. Grey veining drifts across each tile and never lands the same way twice. Some tiles are clear and quiet. Others carry a single vein corner to corner. A soft grey line traces every edge, so the octagon shape stays crisp.

Then the black dots. Small squares, set on point like little diamonds, dropped in where four octagons meet. They aren’t a dead, solid black. A faint stone texture and the occasional pale fleck run through them, the way honed black marble does. That contrast is what gives the floor its punch: high-contrast and graphic from across the room, soft and full of movement up close.

That depth is the part I didn’t want to lose. A patterned floor lives or dies on whether it looks like real stone or looks like a sticker. The printed marble variation and texture is what keeps Cricket on the right side of that line.

The catch, and why we made this

The catch is real marble octagon-and-dot (sometimes sweetly referred to as oct-and-dot) is expensive—both the materials and the install are labor-intensive. You’re paying for the stone, and then you’re paying for someone to set every octagon and hand-place every dot.

It felt like the perfect opportunity for the next tile in our Chris Loves Julia x FloorPops collection. When we designed our own oct-and-dot called “Cricket” after our Bernese mountain dog, the goal was simple: keep the character, drop the barriers.

Our peel-and-stick tile has a beautiful marble-look stone variation and texture printed into it, so the floor has real depth and movement instead of looking flat or repeated. And it can go down in an afternoon. No grout needed. It’s affordable, and it puts a genuinely classic look within reach for a lot more people—without the stone-and-labor price tag.

If you love a patterned floor but checkerboard isn’t feeling right, Cricket is the alternative I can’t recommend enough. It gives you that same graphic, high-contrast punch, but it feels a little more classic and a little less expected.

If you’re new to our peel-and-stick tiles

We’ve been making peel-and-stick floor tiles for a while now, and we’ve put them everywhere from a home gym to a full bathroom floor. If you want to see how they actually hold up in real rooms, our peel-and-stick transformations roundup is the place to start, and there are more patterns and colors here if Cricket isn’t the one for your space.

The install is genuinely a one-afternoon job. Find the center of the room, snap two perpendicular lines, and dry-lay the whole floor before you peel a single backing—that’s the step people want to skip and shouldn’t. Then it’s peel, place, press. All of it, plus how we keep ours clean, is in our FloorPops FAQ and ultimate guide—the one post I’d read start to finish before you order.

A floor that looks like it’s been there for a hundred years, that you can actually put down yourself on a Saturday.

For a limited time, get Cricket for 20% off + free shipping when you spend $100 using code: CRICKET

Shop Chris Loves Julia Peel & Stick Floor Tiles

Where are you going to put Cricket in your home?

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