Design and Style Archives - Page 4 of 6

Boka Restaurant Chicago–Revamped with Cement Tile

Recently renovated BOKA Restaurant has reopened to an avalanche of praise, including “Restaurant of the Year“, and “Chef of the Year” for new partner and executive chef Lee Wolen. While we read that the food is divine, critics also rave about the new decor, which features fabulous Ikat pattern cement tiles from Villa Lagoon Tile.

Boka closed for months to undergo a stunning remodel and menu revamp under new partner and executive chef Lee Wolen. Under Wolen’s expert care, Boka managed to maintain its Michelin star rating. This new remodel features dark woods, black leather, a living wall, and antique artwork and of course our Ikat pattern cement tiles in all four patterns.

In 10 years, Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz, of Boka Restaurant Group, have gone from being fledgling restaurateurs to being the Chicago restaurateurs everyone wants to work for. The Boka name is derived from the first letters of the restaurateurs’ last names.

The entrance area (below) is covered in our Ikat “D” .

The far wall that looks a bit like bricks is really covered in old door hardware. Look closely.

The whole space has a “cool” vibe befitting its “be-seen” crowd

–Zagat

They … transformed Boka’s forgettable decor into a dark and bustling adult playground

–Chicago Magazine

The new look exudes class with a bit of romance and occasional quirk

–Michelin Guide

“Restaurant of the Year” from Jean Banchet Awards for Culinary Excellence (2014)

“Chef of the Year” from Eater (2014), the Jean Banchet Awards (2014), and the Chicago Tribune (2015).

Big Joy in Tiny Tiles

Villa Lagoon Tile’s patterns adorn some of the most charming miniature rooms. Sylvia de Groot, a highly skilled Dutch artist of charming scale model rooms and chateaux uses our Villa Lagoon Tiles Coastal Collection in many of her projects..

Her Chambre de Séraphine has a balcony and bathroom floor of our Trapani “Midnight”. This tile is a Villa Lagoon Tile exclusive and was originally designed by Lundy Wilder for a master bedroom floor.

The potting bench on the balcony has a bit of spilled dirt but this bathroom does look like it needs a good scrubbing !

Another room has tiny tiles of our exclusive Italian Trellis pattern in Taupe and a border tile of Shell Trellis

Another project, a little Greek house has our Trapani tile in the “Azul Frost”.

Back in 2011 ago Kathi Laugherty let us know that she was using our tile in one of her scale model projects.

She cut each VLT exclusive Savona “Beach” tile individually and wrote about it on her blog post.

Her mini beach house kitchen looks wonderfully cozy and whimsical.

We are delighted that miniaturists like our tile for their projects. If you know of others, please drop us an email.

Florentine Shaped Cement Tile

The romance of Italy is captured in our new shaped tile.
The color options are unlimited and cement tile has never looked better !

Villa Lagoon Tile’s “Florentine” shaped tile comes in two parts. The larger piece is about 11 inches at the widest point and the smaller piece is 8 inches across. This tile can come in any thickness. The usual for interiors is 16mm (5/8″) but when thinner or thicker is needed, we can do it.

Our Florentine shaped tile has a slight Fleur-de-Lis relief pattern on each tile which improves traction.

We are stocking it in Black and Featherstone Gray but imagine the possibilities of color combinations.

Our Stock Tile is ready to ship. We started with a Black & Gray combination because it fits so many needs. This would be a stunning wine cellar floor or the foyer in a Hollywood Hills Spanish revival home.

Just imagine a courtyard or restaurant paved in this stunning tile.

Call today to tell us what creative color combinations you want to order as samples using
our South Beach cement tile colors.

Intelligentsia Design With Cement Tile

Chicago’s Logan Square is now home to one of Intelligentsia Coffee’s coffee bars. A low bar with stools sits in the middle of the shop surrounded by Villa Lagoon Tile’s “Nuevo Castillo” cement tile. It has sparse white, angular booths in front of the windows.

They did something very unusual with this tile installation !!

The traditional method of installation is to rotate each tile 90 degrees as it is set, this forms an interlocking pattern of a repeat design. In this instance, the designers chose to just have the tile laid randomly.

Standard versus Random Layout:

The effect is a fresh look at Nuevo Castillo cement tile.

The back wall is covered with a stylized map of the surrounding Chicago neighborhood. The mural’s graphics echo the gray-on-gray pattern of the randomly-laid Nuevo Castillo pattern cement tile. We love what designers and architects can do with their creativity and our patterns.

See photos of the traditional layout of this tile here.

White Bathrooms with Beautiful Floors

While we are lovers of vivid colored walls, not everyone is, especially in the USA. But a white bathroom need not be boring if the floor is singing a happy tune. The pattern above is one we call “Ambrose” and our client ordered it in a crisp blue and white.

Below is a custom tile called Italian Trellis “Azul” from our Coastal Collection. You can click for a larger image to see the details of the seashells and coral. The soft blues and white walls give the effect of shimmering water on a bright day.

One of our classic favorites above, Surf “Agua” with white subway tile walls in this bathroom. A great pattern with movement…jazzy and fun. Click to see the full size image.

A client with a home in the Bahamas chose 2 tiles for the bathrooms. (Note: construction photo) This one has a round shower area shown below. If you think there is a trend of blue cement tile bathroom floors, you are right. This pattern is called “Liz” and it is made with two shades of blue plus white.

Our delightful client, jewelry designer Trish Becker, used a 2 color Aqua and Blanc pattern tile of interlocking rings in one of her homes in the Bahamas. Trish is ‘hooked’ on cement tile and knows how much character it adds to any room it is installed in. She has a couple of vacation homes and she knows that when people rent a cottage for a beach vacation they appreciate decor which makes the stay really special.

Still a bit of blue in this delightful floral cement tile but also the warm golds above and below.

The owner added bright blue glass drawer knobs which was such a great idea.

In the above photo the cement tile bathroom floor appears a bit blue in this photo but it may have been a shade of gray with the white. On the upper right you can catch a glimpse of the rug effect repeated around the toilet in an alcove. Using cement tile to create rug or bordered carpet effect is an old tradition.

Yet another all white bathroom (above) , this time with a Cuban Heritage Tile floor, CH-260-2B.

This last photo is our popular LaEspanola cement tile in an otherwise white bathroom. Even though this is a photo taken during construction, the combination of a clawfoot tub and our cement tile with classic Spanish scroll-work looks like it could be a bathroom in Barcelona as easily as in Florida.

A lively cement tile floor to accent your all-white bathroom can “bring it up a notch” on the cool scale. Click here to see this tile in an all white kitchen.

Stunning Cement Tile in Tone-on-Tone Gray

“Nuevo Castillo” encaustic cement tile lives up to its name turning homes into personal castles. It certainly adds elegance to living spaces throughout North America and UK. This tone-on-tone colorway is one of our best-selling and most-imitated products.

Last week we received photos of a new elegant bathroom from one of our happy clients in Atlanta. The soft two-tone gray cement tile adds depth, without overwhelming the beautifully simple white and wood decor.

This lovely bathroom with lots of natural light would be a delight every morning to help me face my day !

In the next Villa Lagoon Tile installation (below), one of our Hong Kong clients used Nuevo Castillo cement tile in her kitchen and was kind enough to send photos.

Peterssen / Keller Architecture – Minneapolis used our Nuevo Castillo stock cement tile in a sun-room (below) which proved to be a hit with everyone who saw it in the newspaper “Living” section and online.

A California client took the Nuevo Castillo one step further, adding depth with a custom cement tile production using 5 shades of gray !! This tile, with matching borders produced a striking foyer (below).

Black and White and Cool All Over

Maybe it stems from newspapers which are often read in both rooms, or maybe it comes from historical roots, or maybe it is so all colors of accessories look bright and cheerful; but no matter the reason, black, white and sometimes with shades of gray is a popular combination for cement tile floors in kitchens and baths. A popular choice is our Cubes pattern because it is both age-old classic and edgy modern… crisp and clean.
Cubes encaustic tile in a modern NYC kitchen

Villa Lagoon Tile Cubes cement tile in a bathroom

Black and white stripe tile in a restaurant bathroom in the Washington DC area above

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Phillip Sides used our black and white Ikat tile (above) for this kitchen backsplash.

Landscape designer Stany Matz chose a black and white striped tile which forms a alternate reverse square-in-square pattern for his Miami, Florida kitchen.

This photo and the one below show our Large Cubes pattern tile in a Brooklyn, NY townhouse renovation.

Patchwork Tile–The Perfect Mix for a Showhome

Designer Chris Grandmontagne used our Colorful Patchwork encaustic cement tile in her kitchen/family/breakfast great room renovation in the 2013 Topeka Designers’ Show House. Our cement tile went above the stove and to line the bookcases on either side of the fireplace to great effect. In the large kitchen area and family room the Patchwork does not overwhelm but adds just the right amount of cheerfulness without becoming the dominant element of the decor.

Patchwork cement tile backsplash — The niche above the stove has the Patchwork Cement Tile backsplash.

Cement tile backsplash in a niche above the stove — Spacious kitchen in the designer show house in Topeka, Kansas.

We love how Chris used our tile also in the family room area as a background to the built-in custom shelves on either side of the fireplace. Below is a construction photo followed by the completed project.

Encaustic cement tile in the back of custom shelves on either side of a brick fireplace. — Construction photo of the patchwork cement tile going into the back of the custom shelves.

After photo of the family room area — Photo of the family room area

Built in shelves with colorful patchwork tile as a back feature — Family room shelving with Villa Lagoon Tile Colorful Patchwork Tile

family breakfast area in designer show house — Family breakfast room in designer show house with gorgeous deep aqua Fiberglas chairs

Long dining table in a screen porch connected to the family room — Outdoor dining in enclosed screen porch which connects to the family room and kitchen

Topeka Kansas Designer Show Home 2013 — Topeka Kansas Designer Show House 2013

Thanks to designer Chris Grandmontagne …(Don’t you just love that name ??)
of Grandmontagne Designs and Warehouse 414 414 SE 2nd St., Topeka, Ks. 66607
and Stephen Smith Images, 931 Studios, 931 Kansas Ave., Topeka, KS.

Cement Tile Brings France to the Concourse

Travelers through Washington Dulles International Airport will find a new and unusual option at Terminal D. Bistro Atelier brings a taste of French fine dining to travel-weary passengers during their layovers.

Successful restaurant entrepreneur Hakan Ilhan, is no stranger to the difficulties of running an airport eatery. Several of his 25 DC-area restaurants are located in the city’s two major airports. Ilhan’s first area business was a TCBY yogurt franchise at Ronald Reagan National Airport, in 1997. With this project, he paired with Executive Chef John Lewitt to raise the bar of airport dining.

Dinners love the quality and variety of the food… there are not very many places in the world where one can grab a bite of escargot between flights!

It was our pleasure to work with Carlos Moreno and Matt Norris of Norris Design Studio on this project. It’s so gratifying to see images like these of a beautifully completed project. The cement tile featured in this project was “Tulips Sebring” (formerly known as “Roseton”), often available for in-stock, but always available for direct-production.

A Toronto Icon Expands With Custom Cement Tile

The Drake Hotel has become a cultural hotspot of Toronto, known for art, music, and a fun atmosphere. When they decided to expand, they turned to the London office of the Martin Brudnizki Design Studio to define the look of “Drake One Fifty” (named for its location at 150 York Street). In March, Zagat listed it among “Toronto’s 10 Hottest Restaurants“, applauding Brudnizki’s work as, “a beautifully designed space with plenty of eye candy“.

This project shows the great flexibility of cement tile to help bring a designer’s vision to fruition. It’s very common to create custom pattern molds for clients, whether reproducing historic patterns, bringing new designs to life, or tweaking existing designs to taste. In this case, we were able to go a step beyond, and had our Moroccan facility create two brand new shapes. First, an elongated hexagonal shape mold was created, then a matching triangular mold was created to form the keys of the layout pattern.

A photo shot on the factory floor in Morocco, showing several of the custom hexagonal and triangular cement tiles in their final arrangement. — An image sent from the factory floor in Morocco.

For those interested in the production of cement tile, here are several images showing one of our master artisans creating the custom hex tile.

Cement tile production. The Artisan is clamping the custom hexagonal shape mold to the mold's base. — Mold Assembly

Cement tile production. The Moroccan artisan is inserting the cement tile pattern mold into the shape mold. — Insert Pattern Mold

Cement tile production. The artisan is pouring the color layer of wet cement into the mold. One region will be filled with white pigment, the other with black. — Pour Color Layer

Cement tile production. The pattern mold is removed, showing the wet color layer of the black and white tile. — Remove Pattern Mold

Cement tile production. dry cement is sifted into the mold on top of the color layer, the tile is constructed with the surface down. — Add Body-Layer Cement

Cement tile production. The artisan levels the cement in the mold with a straight edge. — Leveling

Cement tile production. The artisan places a cap that fits snug into the mold, before putting the mold into the hydraulic press to compact the cement into a tile. — Cover and Press

One of our Moroccan master artisans displaying a freshly-pressed custom hexagonal tile. The elongated hex is black and white, in two color regions bisecting the hexagon along a line between the most distant points. — Displaying the Tile

Simply put, Drake One Fifty’s interior is near-perfection…

View the Vibe

With the Drake One Fifty, Toronto can now claim to have one of the coolest restaurants in the world.

Le Travelist

…a bit of Queen West style and culture plunked down in the middle of Toronto’s financial district.

Post City

In the process of creating this solution, we proposed several variations of this Venetian mosaic theme in standard square and hexagonal formats. We loved them all so much, we produced one of them with our Venetian Collection, 8″ Treviso. 8″ square cement tile is the most economical format, and this smaller scale is more suitable to residential surfaces.