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.