Mosaic your personal space
‘IF I COULD, I would tile the world,” Gerry Eisenberg said. “Because I think it is the most wonderful medium.”
Eisenberg has not yet paved the streets in 1-inch-by-1-inch squares. But last summer, she did install a large mosaic in her master bathroom. Spidery tree branches rendered in stone tile are accented with 24-carat gold glass pieces incorporated in the form of delicate leaves.
The mosaic design, executed by the company New Ravenna, takes up the shower wall, with a unifying ribbon of leaves encircling the room.
After renovating her historic 1920 house in Aiken, South Carolina, Eisenberg saved the bath project to do in a special way. “What is more wonderful than mosaic? What is more traditional?” she said. “But mosaic with gold glass to give it that modern zip.”
Tile mosaics, often associated with churches and the Roman Empire, are hardly modern. But with the current maximalist insurgency in the design world, with the entirely welcome return of colour and pattern and idiosyncratic interiors, elaborate tile installations may soon follow wallpaper as an oldfashioned adornment updated and rediscovered.
“In these handcrafted mosaics, you get pattern on pattern on pattern,” said Cean Irminger, creative director for the Virginiabased New Ravenna, which recently unveiled a new collection of designs, including “Mod Palm”, a tropical motif that blends glossy and matte glass. “It can be super intricate and detailed.”
Kim Wozniak, who runs Witsend Mosaic, an online tile store that sells to artists and homeowners, said glass tile is surprisingly adaptable.
“Everybody thinks of this old Byzantine style,” she said. “But it can really be anything you want it to be” – or go anywhere, not just in bathrooms and kitchens. “Foyers, for example. You can do it like a rug, but it’s inlaid in the floor.”
Eran Chen, founder and executive director of the architectural firm ODA New York, is a fan of glass tile because it is “a true material”.
He explained: “It has a combination of playfulness, colour, light, but it’s still a natural material. That’s rare.”
In the last decade, Chen said, glass tile has become more affordable and also more creative, with computer programs that allow for the transfer of an image – a favourite postcard, a painting, a photo of your cat – into a custom mosaic.
“It’s personalising your space in a daring way,” said Chen, who thinks that aspect will appeal especially to millennials for whom individuality is everything. “Minimalism sometimes makes it more difficult to tell personal stories.”
Glass mosaics certainly have the power to stun, especially after two decades of shelter magazine spreads of spare, mid-century modern interiors.
To walk into Bisazza’s Manhattan showroom is to feel like a visually starved person being treated to a banquet.
There are kaleidoscopic mosaics of Renaissance-esque floral bouquets, geometric patterns, the giant face of young Napoleon Bonaparte.
Piero Bisazza, the chief executive, said the 62-year-old company has never wavered in its love of colour and pattern.
“You do not change your identity because fashion goes one direction or another,” he said.
“We enjoy decoration, there’s no denying it.”
Nevertheless, he is finding that fashion is coming to them. “Flower power is very, very strong,” Bisazza said when asked about his most popular designs. “The pendulum is swinging back to rich – not opulent – but rich interiors.” – The New York Times