After doing floor installation of premium quality pure white Italian through-body porcelain tiles in a new women’s clothing store at Ossington Ave, the founder of fast-growing Canadian fashion brand Grit and Grace, Penny Light gave us a really unique chance to work on the custom design for the store’s feature wall.
While exploring different ideas on how to bring material and colour richness into the space, we looked into the Grit and Grace brand story and vision of founder Penny Light. Some of the interior elements of the new store were arched-shaped walls, and a rounded shape cashier desk with a dimensional fluted finish.
With scallop shape tiles, we knew we could create a special piece for that space and enhance the in-store experience for women that come to shop and discover unique cloth pieces. We thought those tile pieces could also evoke the look of garment frills or lace.
Before we decided to go with scallop mosaics we reviewed a few other scallop or fan formats and finishes by various manufacturers. Some were handmade such as ones from Redrock Tileworks from Nashville, and other two by Spanish tile factories Equipe and Best Tiles. We even consider making them from scratch in Toronto. However, none of those could work. It was either a lead time, budget or color that couldn’t fit.
There is one option that has a lot of potential. The new product created for the Canadian market is a Scallop design from the Soho collection that I designed for Canadian tile distributor and manufacturer Anatolia. It has a beautiful and intricate scallop shape, the product was readily available and the price was great. The only ones that were missing were colours that match Grit and Grace brand colours (Dust Pink and Dark Pink).
The design of the surface texture was also helpful to create additional depth and movement of colour. In order to get Penny’s brand colours we worked with the Color X crew at Davenport Rd in Tronto to develop a special paint that could be applied on glazed tile.
Developing a custom paint that has special viscosity to move into the relief of tile and at the same coating needed to have durability and be scratch resistant was very very tricky. Luckily staff of Color X were open-minded, creative, and willing to experiment ultimately extremely patient with us. They basically needed to invent a coating for us by mixing 2 different paints. It took a few iterations and back and forth before we got the right coating quality and colour.
After we got the tile paint structure and colour solved, it was a fairly quick process to paint around 200 tiles, 3×4” each which was approximately a third of an entire number of pieces. At the same time, we were wrapping up our discussion about layout proposals and getting approval from Penny.
4 weeks after we started the first discussion about the mosaic piece wall was finally ready to start the installation.
Luckily, Djuro was super experienced with mosaic tile installations as he did many of them in Italy, France and Montenegro.
There were many small cuts to be made as the tiles were very delicate and we also need to keep them together on the mesh for more consistent spacing.
The final product was awesome! We were all very pleased and happy with the result. The entire process was a really enjoyable experience and we hope Penny’s customers will love it and enjoy being in her new store at 107 Ossington Ave in Toronto.
Leave a Reply