Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic, co-owners of Heath Ceramics, are out with a new book, Tile Makes the Room. The title makes a bold statement, and the book uses 245 gorgeously illustrated pages to back it up. Actually, they had us at the cover: a textured, 3D representation of a geometric tile installation. We asked Bailey to share some of her favorite photos from the book and thoughts about making a powerful design impact with tile. "Tile can make a room if you start to think about it as something more than just a functional element and work it into the overall room design carefully. Think of tile as a way to ground a design through pattern and color and texture," she says. "Consider the apartment above Heath in San Francisco (seen above and the basis for the book's cover) where tile extends from floor to double height ceiling to create a dramatic, sophisticated effect that elevates the space."
↑ "Tile—particularly beautiful handcrafted tile—brings materiality into the room, and with them, great materials bring soul, depth, and liveliness. And that is the essence of a great space. One of our favorite examples of this: Commune Design's beautiful work at the Farmshop restaurant in Larkspur, California. Tile expresses the soul of the restaurant's philosophy, while warming up a space through texture and color."
↑ "Tile can make a room because it's part of the architecture! It's not just surface, but really unifies the building itself with the interior spaces. You get context and a cohesiveness that you don't always get if you just think about the building as the "shell" and the interior as something completely separate or unrelated to the exterior. This kind of integration feels honest to us, with an integrity that you don't just see but feel."
↑ "Tile's a really wonderful way to integrate the outdoors with the indoors, to create unity and flow between spaces. But it's not just about extending it on the floor from indoor to outdoor as it's beautifully done in the Catalina House by Commune."
↑ "It can also be a continuing motif on walls between spaces as in it is in this house in Sao Paulo, Brazil."
↑"Graphical tile, or better yet, tile that's laid out in a striking pattern can create a strong accent for a room that feels more like art than pure function! Consider the Zittel House where wall meets floor, where a strong graphical pattern unifies not just one room to the next but floors with walls. At Heath, we've used our Mural pattern to create a strong focal point that's dramatic and dynamic."
↑ "Tile can make a room because it's part of the architecture. It's not just surface, but really unifies the building itself with the interior spaces. This kind of integration feels honest to us, with an integrity that you don't just see but feel."
Reprinted with permission from Tile Makes the Room, by Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey, copyright © 2015, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Photographs copyright © 2015 by Thomas Anderson, Jessica Eckert, Rafaela Netto, Mariko Reed.
· Tile Makes the Room: Good Design from Heath Ceramics [Amazon]