Tiling on up!

Gavin has done an amazing job tiling a mini kitchen in a servants' room in the basement of the castle. He finished today, using a remaindered job lot of terracotta tiles that I located on eBay.

tiling completed

Hopefully the brick-like quality of the tiles engenders a period servant-vibe. Historic interiors can be decimated, in my opinion, by inserting modernist kitchen units. What is certain is that in 15 years time the modernist kitchen units will no longer look modernist, and will need ripping out. The ethos at Balintore is "restore once, restore properly".

I had a hard job persuading Gavin that the tiles should go above the bottom of the kitchen units, then above the top of the kitchen units, then to the top of the window frame. :-) I reckoned that taking the tiles to the ceiling would be too over-powering and interfere with any coving, but framing a cuboidal volume in which the kitchen sits, acts to zone and then characterise the space. Fortunately, when Gavin called me in at each decision point, it was pretty clear which way to go.

Gavin initially wanted to stop here

before the tiling began

Gaving suggested using some teracotta tiles when tiling a shower in the adjacent room to tie together the look, and I very much agreed with this. However, the bone-coloued crackle-glaze tiles which are also going to be used are a completely different size, and we worried about the clash. Gavin left a trial layout sitting on the worktop this afternoon, with teracotta bands dividing areas of bone tiles. What do you reckon? 

potential mixed-tile layout for shower

Surprisingly enough, because the zones are very different colours, I don't think the different tile sizes matter!