And the look is modern (see the bathroom posts here and here). I've been agonizing over the floor - marble, glass, porcelain? cream, brown, green? - without finding anything that jumped out at me. Until today.
Meet the Grunions -
Or a Matisse-like flower -
They're encaustic cement tiles - called Cuban tiles in Florida, and Moroccan tiles on HGTV, though they were actually invented in medieval Europe. (We have them on the hearth in my mother's living room.) Instead of a traditional or cutesy-sailboat design, however, these are modern, designed by an architect named Jeff Shelton in Santa Barbara (lots more of his wonderful designs here). The tiles are 12x12, and they're custom made - you choose your own colors from a yummy palette (here and here).
The Grunions (above) are my favorite, of course - I'd do them in shades of green and salmon - but is this all getting too zoomorphic? Everything I like has little eyes - the birds in the kitchen, these sea monsters in the bathroom (though in real life grunions turn out to be squiggly little fish, seven inches long, with odd mating rituals). Also I'm a little worried that it might be too big a pattern for my tiny bathroom, which is why I was looking at the smaller Matisse-like pattern too. People do use Cuban tile in the bathroom - I've seen it in magazines and on websites - and it's probably no more slippery than anything else.
In a funny way, I'm looping back to the tile I fell in love with first for the bathroom floor (but couldn't have because it's $100/sq. ft.) - a serpentine pattern that links from tile to tile.
how did the grunion tile work out?
ReplyDeleteI am interested in the grunion because I am thinking of using some of the Sheldon Tile in a project of my own. I was wondering how you like the tile, how hard it was to seal and keep clean? Do you have pictures of the finished product? Also how was the supplier?
ReplyDeleteThanks so much
I didn't go with the grunions after all - I decided they would be too busy in my tiny bathroom. But I am using a more traditional encaustic tile pattern in a hallway, and we put encaustic tile in front of my mother's gas fireplace years ago. It's very durable, and it's not hard to seal or keep clean. Read the detailed installation instructions at villalagoontile.com.
ReplyDeleteWhat IS hard is shipping it without breaking it. I bought my tile in person in Miami and then tried to send it home via U.S. Mail (well packed) - fortunately it was insured because most of the tiles broke! Unfortunately I couldn't find a supplier except in Miami or California, and they charge a lot for truck shipping a small order.