Small Home Gazette, Summer 2018

Creative Solutions: Tile With Character 

One design aspect the Twin Cities Bungalow Club has featured regularly in its annual home tour is the use of tile; most often in bathrooms and kitchens. Seeing all those great tile installations can lead to a serious case of tile envy. Here is an example of bungalow owners who added character to a rather plainly tiled bathroom.

Top It Off

Their bathroom featured four-by-four-inch wall tiles with a delicate tan swirl pattern on a cream background. These covered all four walls to a height of about four feet. The floor featured one-inch-square tiles with pastel blue, green, yellow, peach and tan squares spaced randomly in a field of cream.

The problem was that the cream wall tiles just ended without any decoration to “top off” the walls. Typically, bungalow bathrooms had multiple bands of color at the top. The tiles were in excellent shape, and their tile consultant, Jan Hohn of Hohn and Hohn Designs, was concerned that attempting to remove any of the wall tiles would risk serious damage to the plaster wall surface behind. Hohn proved to be a wealth of knowledge and practical advice for the homeowners, as well as an excellent tile setter.

After a day or two of visiting tile shops in the Twin Cities and finding little that would integrate with their vintage tile, the homeowners remembered that Clay Squared to Infinity might have a better selection. It didn’t take owner Josh Blanc long to help them select a two-by-six-inch wave pattern trim tile in skyline blue with over-glazed edges on the top and bottom. The new tiles repeated the pastel blue found in the floor, and the wave pattern was perfect for a bathroom.

A New Direction

The resulting combination of tile adds more visual interest to the bathroom. The new tile also provided a direction for the room’s color scheme, including choice of paint for the walls.

To the eye of someone who knows historic tile treatments, it is clear that the trim tile was added much later than the wall tile. But that reality simply adds complexity to the room’s “story” and character to this bungalow.

Other Examples?

If you know of other creative solutions to make bungalows more livable, send them to us at mail@bungalowclub.net. Whether they save space; provide modern convenience with an historically-appropriate appearance; or simply make the best of a difficult situation, we would love to share them in the Small Home Gazette.

Resources

Clay Squared to Infinity
www.claysquared.com

Hohn & Hohn, Inc.
www.hohnandhohntile.com