This paper is an attempt at reading 1970s -1990s Cairo, through the banal object of bathroom tiles. The decades of 1970s-1990s are when the Egyptian state had its protracted flirtation with Infitah, the open market, and later the full espousal of neoliberalism in its multiple mutations. A lot of important literature has documented the transformation of the city through tracing neoliberal urbanism. Yet, in this paper, I want to foreground banal material fragments in reading this transformation aesthetically. I do so through tracing the ceramic bathroom tile in three registers. First, archival research that traces advertisement material of new domestic material. Second, literature and film that looked used these tiles as an object of desire, and a marker of class aspiration. Finally, I look at how this recladding of spaces of domesticity became an urban aesthetic through Cairo of the 1990s.  My purpose in this paper is to pause at this ordinary, everyday and even banal object of desire as a scene of attachment to the neoliberal everyday (following affect theorists Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart), and to unpack the constellation of promises it gathered. In doing so, I use an approach that attends to materiality and affect, specifically on recladding the spaces of domesticity, and I argue that it is intertwined with Cairene aspirational urban aesthetics.