The Trend to Tile

by Dana DuGan
photos by David N. Seelig

The trend to tile has reached a zenith here in the Wood River Valley, thanks to the help of designers with the knowledge and access to quality materials and craftsman-like tile setters. Nearly all new houses in the area have tiling in the bathrooms and kitchens. It has become de riguer. Fortunately, decorating with tile is hardly an unknown. 

Masonry is the oldest of the building trades.

Masonry traditions, of which tile setting is one, go back to well before biblical times. Mud and stone, with straw and sticks as reinforcement, were the materials used to build the first non-cave homes.

While clay tiles were first produced approximately 8,000 years ago in the Middle East, little has changed since then in the tile setting trade. The most notable historic event was the invention of cement mortar by the Romans.

New methods and materials have, of course, been introduced, but tile setting continues to be a labor-intensive process done entirely by hand. 

Glazed decorative tiles are first known to have been produced in Egypt, and from there the tile making art spread to Persia (Iran) and across North Africa to Spain.

It was aboard Spanish ships that decorative clay tiles found their way to the New World, where they were used primarily to decorate newly built missions. 

Today, ceramic tiles have emerged from the shadows of old churches as a trendy home accessory and are used in an almost infinite number of ways throughout the world.

Around the valley, tiles, marble and granite are used creatively and in a practical fashion. In showers, sinks, and on counters, clients are having their passions and hobbies integrated into the decorative synergy of the whole house. They are also relying on more natural looking and feeling materials.

Sun Valley Kitchen and Bath associate Cathy Spiller is working with a lot of natural materials, she said.

The aesthetic value tiling gives a house is at once personal and earthy.

“It’s a trend to tile whole bathrooms, using tile as a decorative aspect instead of a utilitarian one.”

Tiling is being used as wainscot and around mirrors.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Europe around here. 

Beautiful custom tiles used to be something an intrepid traveler lugged back by hand from Morocco or Portugal. But now there is a myriad of options for tiling and resources from which to find them. In the Sun Valley Kitchen and Bath showroom are marbles, granites and metal tiles, as well as ceramic tiles that are painted, colored, old and utilitarian. They purchase many of their tiles through wholesalers in California.

“I want to make sure I have a good fit with what the client wants,” Spiller said. Individual tastes expressed with tiling is a way to customize a home and it’s good for resale, she added. “Custom tile work separates a home from a spec house.”

When planning the tiling for a home she takes into account the “style of the house, the lifestyle of the clients and, yes, the aesthetics of their lives.” 

“We’re seeing a lot of glass and metal being mixed with natural materials.” 

Exceptional and fun clients are those who’ll try different things with different materials, Spiller said. One such client in the Flying Heart area of Hailey has used limestone, marble and granite in her kitchen and two bathrooms. Accented with contemporary French light fixtures and natural silk window treatments, the effect seems sophisticated and fresh.

The marble is tumbled to smooth it out and make ragged corners. In the powder room metal tiles border the marble giving it a rustic sheen, which on closer inspection seems improbably modern.

In a house in the Valley Club, built by Roth & Sons Construction and tiled by Alex Cherian of Cherian Construction, builders have used a polished granite throughout the kitchen, on the counters and in the sink, with a stove-top back splash of tumbled Durango cross-cut travertine. They also used the same travertine, albeit honed, in the bathrooms. 

The large and open, family-friendly kitchen cost $100 per square foot of granite. The additional Durango travertine costs much less, ringing in at $25 per square foot.

Cherian refers to the tiling process as “five steps of back breaking work”: wiring, cementing or floating, thin-setting the tiles, grouting and sealing—sometimes with as many as five coats of sealer to ensure penetration of the stone. The natural stones in vogue right now are warmer than marble, but do require more maintenance. Cherian recommends that the stones be resealed once a year. Grout also needs redoing over the years, and marble is easy to stain and etch with citric acids.

Cherian also did all the granite and marble work in the Sun Pointe town houses in Elkhorn and worked on the new deluxe townhouses, The Hemingways, in Warm Springs, built by Wes Nash. They have tumbled stone throughout, with decorative Greca tumbled accent stripes.

The stone and marble Cherian uses is mostly from Mexico and South America. 

Local artists Jim Holcomb with Idaho Mudworks and Leslee Jago paint their own tiles, and both are known for their decorative paintings on counters and in sinks. Jago also makes her own glazed tiles and custom paints them for clients, or paints onto preconstructed tiles and then refires them. 

“My style is commissions. I take ideas from clients.” 

She described her work as illustrative, and romantic with use of garden and wild flowers, animals, insects, birds and tromp l’oeil.

For the Western-style home, she also is often called on to paint trout, elk, cowboy and American Indian motifs. She uses China Paint, which goes on like watercolor and is fired at a lower heat.

Jago also makes her own three-dimensional relief tiles in her studio, which has two kilns, a large painting space and a spare bed. From these tiles she makes molds to keep for further use. 

One of her more fanciful designs for a client depicted a lamb in a shower with a rope around its neck. The rope winds its way out of the shower and around the bathroom until it emerges from the sink drain and then winds up into a coil on the counter.

“Sometimes it’s a total departure,” she said. “I don’t like repetitions. I do like working with people and making them happy.”

Local architect Tobin Dougherty, who has many forward looking clients, claims that one of the inclinations now is toward colors, textures and shades of the past, such as were popular in the ’20s and ’30s. Being recreated, for instance, are the rediscovered mission-style tiling and tile with a craftsman flavor. “New spins on old styles,” he calls it.

In designing kitchens and baths with custom tiles, designers and tilers know that the use of natural stone countertops combined with design elements such as contrasting tile accents bring to mind the soothing colors of the sea, the lush greens of nature and soft yellows of a sunny day. 

Dougherty, who has designed kitchens for national magazines, said, “You can do a lot more with tile. Of all the surfaces that you can find, tile offers a wide variety: ceramic, clay, glass, porcelain, arts and crafts, metal. They’re all wonderful.” •