Tile Mania

This is the concept we're leaning toward at the moment.

The biggest thing we've been working on for the last many weeks is trying to decide on detail design and materials for our fireplace. We've finally settled on a basic shape, and we know the stucco and flagstone we'll use to match existing walls and benches. But we wanted some sort of tile and/or stone accents. George sketched out a concept of using molding to create an arch over the fireplace opening (even though the actual opening is rectangular), and he also wanted to use molding under the mantel as a corbel-like accent rail.

We decided it was better to articulate the chimney partway up, rather than have such a tall flat vertical face.

We had originally pictured the chimney having a flat front face all the way up, and putting a large vertically oriented design on the face. But our designer suggested it would be better to articulate the chimney face at the same height as where the sides articulate, and visually demarcate it with ledger stone. After playing around with various concepts in OpenOffice Draw, we decided that was a good idea.

We'd been looking at tile wherever we encountered it all over town, and we'd also been looking at several vendors, including Avente Tile - an Internet tile vendor with some beautiful hand-painted Spanish tile and cuerda seca California tile, Mission Tile West - in South Pasadena with an overwhelming showroom, and a couple of places on Melrose in the design district. It's nice that so many vendors have websites, cause it allowed me to grab images of the tiles, scale them, and make relatively realistic scale mock-ups of different concepts on my computer.

When we first saw the dazzling Mission Tile West showroom, we were very taken with their Batchelder tile. We pictured it fitting into travertine on the face under the mantel.

We then imagined going totally Batchelder crazy, and using Batchelder-style field tile all over the firebox face and sides. We eventually decided that, cool as the Batchelder stuff is for Craftsman homes, it's not really the right style for our home.

We were very taken with this mural, and some of the beautiful deco tiles from a line called MRT at Mission Tile West. The lotus flowers were especially appropriate for Echo Park. Unfortunately, this mural was a bit large for where we wanted to put it.

We had also imagined using some hand-painted Spanish tiles from Avente tile. This ornate blue-and-white pattern works nicely with our stucco color, and with travertine on the firebox face.

This concept blends the Caceres Spanish tile with a Moorish star from Avente's Celtic line.

A variation on the previous concept, but instead of the Caceres Spanish tile, we tried some cuerda seca tiles from Avente's California line.

George checked out some of the tile shops on Melrose in the design district, and found some beautiful classical mosaics. To do this border around the fireplace required not doing the arch. We didn't find an ideal mosaic for the top. The graphic I used here was taken from a wine label (Tyler pinot noir - an excellent wine).

This is a variation on the concept we're leaning toward. Having figured out the center piece, using Avente's California cuerda seca tiles ("San Francisco" and "San Diego"), we're playing with different color field tile on the border. The green makes it pop a bit more, but matching the cobalt in the tiles has the neat effect of making the border encroach on the tile in an interesting pattern.

Here I'm just playing around with different concepts on a few different Avente California tiles. You always want to put several together, because the composite will form more patterns than you can see in a single tile. I'm trying different field tile colors against them. I'm also playing with slicing one pattern and using it as a border for another pattern.

Another pergola example

George spied this pergola at St. John of God, one of the nursing homes he calls on. It kind of shows the 4x4"x4" technique our architect is proposing for our posts, although they just show it at the top of their posts and cover it up most of the way up. One interesting thing they did was instead of having the usual two beams sandwiching the post, they had one 4"-wide beam threading through the 4x4"x4". It's a nice look.

Visualizing a fireplace design

Sometimes it's hard to really visualize a design as drafted on paper, especially trying to figure out how the scale and volume really fits in the intended site. So George and I took to putting sticks and string in the ground to lay out benches and planters, and used some trellises, a couple of chairs, and more sticks to mock up how a fireplace would look in a corner of our backyard. That made it much easier for us to determine that a nice chimney height would be about 4-1/2 feet above the six-foot wall (see photo on right).

We had originally been picturing a fireplace built in to a wall cutting a 45-degree angle to the corner, but our architect came up with the idea of having the fireplace be faceted, with its main face on the 45-degree angle, but with side facets at right angles to the wall. That gave the structure more interest and depth. He also included a mantle at 4-1/2 feet, with a similarly faceted chimney structure rising up from there. Once it was drawn, we didn't really like the look of that chimney, though, especially the part that rises above the wall. Since that part is viewable from many angles, it would look funny when viewed from spots where it would be visually decoupled from its faceted fireplace context. Thus, we think we'd like the part of the chimney above the wall to be rectangular in footprint. We've been picturing one with a broader face and then slightly tapering to the top. Using paper, I made a rough 1"=1' model so we could picture it better.

George has a couple of concerns about that version. He's not happy with the "wedding cake" look of having three tiers, and wonders if it will look funny to have the chimney sitting on the wall (as opposed to inside it). He also wants the fireplace to have a bit more substantial frame above it, so he suggested raising the mantel level 6" to 5', and then having the rectangular chimney rise from there. I worried that the rectangular footprint would look funny if it started below the top of the wall, as there would be acute angled wedge spaces on its sides, so I thought it might be better to fill those in to right angles below the wall, and let it be rectangular above the wall, but with one continuous chimney face rising up from one mantle. That's the second version of paper model (pretend that the chimney face is continuous, even though you can see that the first foot of it is a separate piece in my model, ditto for the 6" raising of the fireplace mantel).

Pergola posts

Our architect is proposing to make our pergola posts be a composite of four 4x4" posts in a four-square arrangement, with 4" spacing between (that's "lumber inches", so 4" is really 3.5"). It sounds like a neat idea, and we haven't seen it before, though we did come across this photo of an example on Flickr (click to see larger). Our only concern is whether the composite post would be too "beefy" (it would be 10.5" square, though not solid). The posts in this photo look quite beefy, although if I'm eyeballing it right, those are four 6x6" posts. We just need to reassure ourselves that four 4x4" posts won't overwhelm the scale of our modest pergola (it'll be about 9' by 10').

We're not sure yet how the top of our posts would fit with the beams. In many pergolas, the beams align with the top of the posts, or even set on top of them. In this example, the posts rise above the whole structure (with an attractive "collar" cut). Don't know how that would look if we also had a third level of 2x2" rafters.

I also really like the end-cut on the beam and rafter tails. It's a nice clean modern line that would suit our house well. For our house, I don't think many of the more ornate end-cuts would look right, and I prefer more straight lines to round. Some modern pergolas just have a flat end with no cut, but George doesn't like that.

A good pergola example

I like the look of the end-cut of the tails on this pergola's beams and joists. I also like the layout with 2x6 joists and 2x2 rafters, both with 1' spacing. I like the joists notched into the beams. This is a similar situation to our patio, with a wall on the back and side of the pergola (in ours, there wouldn't be the wall on the left side), and it fits under the eaves. I could also imagine a variant where the whole thing was a bit higher, and that the rafters didn't extend quite so far, so that they could be level with the eaves instead of under them (i.e., the beam would extend under the eaves, but the rafters may not).