Beaumont Tiles Brand Guidelines: RJ Beaumont’s 1960 Grote Street Tile Shop, Now Bunnings-Owned

A family tile shop in the centre of Adelaide.

Beaumont Tiles began in Adelaide in 1960. The South Australian news site InDaily reported in April 2021 that RJ Beaumont established the business that year and set up a showroom in Grote Street, in the city centre; Inside Retail gave the same founding year and founder in 2018. The company’s own website puts its beginnings in Adelaide in the 1960s and still names Grote Street as the place where one showroom grew into a national network.

The business stayed in the family for more than six decades. RJ Beaumont’s son, Bob Beaumont, ran it for decades: Inside Retail reported in March 2018 that he was then marking his fiftieth year running the company, and in 2021 he described it as “a business that my dad started in South Australia.” He was its executive chairman when it was sold. The legal entity behind the brand, as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s merger register records it, is R J Beaumont & Co, which keeps the founder’s initials. The company often shortens its own name to Beaumonts on its website.

From Adelaide the chain spread interstate and grew largely through franchising. In 2018 Inside Retail counted 115 stores across Australia, serving both retail and commercial customers; in 2016 the same publication reported a network of 106 stores and a new distribution centre at Rochedale, on the outskirts of Brisbane, to supply Queensland and northern New South Wales, alongside a high-end design studio of about 730 square metres in the inner-Brisbane suburb of Fortitude Valley. The Rochedale building replaced a smaller site at Archerfield, the publication said.

Showrooms, studios and the trade.

Beaumont Tiles sells to two audiences at once. The ACCC, in its review of the 2021 sale, described it as a specialist tile retailer and franchise operator with a commercial sales business, and explained how such specialists differ from a hardware chain: they show a much wider range in dedicated tile showrooms, offer design advice and referrals to tilers, deliver tiles to customers, and in some cases supply large residential builders directly on site. The regulator also noted that most tiles sold in Australia are imported.

The store formats follow that split. The company’s website describes a network of 115 showrooms, Studios, Clearance Centres and Trade Centres, a national support office and headquarters in the Adelaide suburb of Marleston, and warehouses in several states. Its range runs from wall, floor and outdoor tiles in porcelain, marble and other natural stone to hard flooring such as engineered timber, hybrid and laminate, as well as bathroomware, tapware and tiling products, with tiles sorted on the site by country of origin, including Australian-made and Italian-made ranges.

Television has become one of its showcases. The company says its tiles appear on home-renovation programmes including The Block, and its website keeps a page for each season that matches products to the rooms shown on screen.

Western Australia came later. Inside Retail reported in August 2023 that Beaumont Tiles, which had previously run a Builders Selection Centre in the state for large builders, opened a retail store in Joondalup on 5 August 2023. Its chief executive, Danny Casey, said the newer stores had larger footprints and a new fit-out, with bathroom settings, product displays, a cafe and a play table where customers can lay out tiles together to try combinations.

Showrooms, samples and ranges.

Flooring, carpet and tile retailers sell something that is hard to judge on a screen. A carpet’s pile, a vinyl plank’s grain and a tile’s glaze are chosen by hand and by eye, so these companies present themselves largely through physical display: showroom floors laid with sample sections, racks of carpet samples, stands of plank flooring and, in tile shops, walls set with finished panels. Several now take the showroom to the customer as well, sending vans or fitters with sample boards to measure a room at home, and their websites let shoppers order small samples before they buy.

Range and store naming tend to be plain. Collections are usually named for a material, a colour or a place, and products are grouped by room and by type, such as carpet, laminate, vinyl, luxury vinyl tile, engineered wood or porcelain, rather than by technical code. Shop fascias usually carry the retailer’s own name in large type, and some chains also run concessions inside department stores under their own brand.

The advertising follows the same practical line. The companies’ own pages and press reports show campaigns built around sales periods, interest-free credit, home visits and fitting, published in catalogues, on television, online and on shop windows, with buying guides that explain yarns, finishes and room-by-room choices.

Behind the shops, the corporate story is often one of founders, family owners, investors and changes of control. Corporate pages and press reports record listings on and departures from stock markets, private-equity and hedge-fund owners, administrations and pre-pack sales, and brands that survive after the original company has closed. This guide sets out who founded each chain, who owns it and what happened to it, as dated sources record it.

A family business inside a hardware group.

The family era ended in 2021. On 28 April 2021 Bunnings, the hardware chain owned by Wesfarmers, announced an agreement to buy Beaumont Tiles, InDaily and SmartCompany reported, subject to conditions including regulatory approval. Bunnings said Beaumont Tiles would remain separate and distinct from its own warehouse stores, as Adelaide Tools had after Bunnings bought it in 2020.

The ACCC examined the deal under its informal merger review process, asked the parties for more information, put back a proposed decision date of 5 August 2021 while it waited for answers, and on 30 September 2021 announced that it would not oppose the purchase. It concluded that the acquisition was not likely to substantially lessen competition, because specialist tile retailers compete most closely with one another, while Bunnings sold tiles mainly “off the shelf” to do-it-yourself customers. In that review the regulator described Beaumont Tiles as Australia’s largest tile retailer, noted that larger chains, regional chains, online sellers and many small independent shops would remain, and named National Tiles among the larger competitors.

Bunnings completed the purchase at the start of November 2021, Inside Retail reported on 1 November; its managing director, Mike Schneider, said the deal would help Bunnings serve builders and flooring trade customers. Beaumont Tiles was to keep running as a separate business, and its national support office stayed in Adelaide. English Wikipedia says the Bunnings Group included 112 Beaumont Tiles stores as of 2025.

For a design guide, Beaumont Tiles shows how a single city showroom can become a national franchise brand that keeps its own name and voice inside a much larger retail group. Compare Topps Tiles, the British tile specialist, and Tile Mountain, a younger tile seller that added showrooms to an online business. For this guide we use terracotta, sandstone and eucalyptus green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Beaumont Tiles’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.