Believe it or not, not all gorgeous European tile comes from Italy

I wrote yesterday about Petracer's from Modena in Italy. Well if you head south west and across the Mediterranean for about 1200 kilometers you'll come to Castellón de la Plana in the Castellón province of the València community in Spain. Here's a map for those of you who are geographically impaired.

Castellón de la Plana is the home of Dune ceramics.

Dune ceramics was a real stand out at the last Coverings show and what these people are doing with tile and metallics is setting a new standard. Just look at all this beauty.

Dune's motto is Pasión por Decorar and that translates into English as something like Going Further in Decoration. I'd say they're living up to their motto. What say ye? Is it beautiful or is it too much?

Petracer's makes beauty

I'm putting my travel schedule together for 2010 and one of the highlights will no doubt be attending Coverings this year. Coverings is the trade show for the tile, stone and flooring industries and it takes place in Orlando from April 27th through April 30th this year. I'm very much a tile guy, and Coverings is a feast in every sense of the word.

Coverings is an international show and the world's best and most interesting producers and manufacturers show off their wares during those three days in April. The Italians are well represented of course and for me, it's the Italian companies that push the envelop farthest.

The last time I attended Coverings, I had the distinct pleasure of spending some time with the sales and marketing team from Petracer's Pregiate Ceramiche Italiane. In English, that means "Petracer's Precious Italian Ceramic." They are aptly named.

Petracer's is based just outside of Modena in Emilia-Romagna. Modena is renowned for it's basalmic vinegar of course, but it's also a hot bed of Italy's tile industry.

Petracer's tile has a unique aesthetic and I say they produce the most authentically Italian tile in the business. There's a distinctive look to Italian decorative art and Petracer's captures it perfectly. There's a spare and clean feel to the aesthetics I'm describing. Petracer's look whispers instead of shouting. And when it does raise its voice, it's a joyful sound indeed.

Look at some of their offerings here. What do you think?

Let's paint my living room (or yours)

I have an army man green wall in my living room and I hate it.

I didn't hate it when I painted it of course, but it is time for a change. I painted it a little more than five years ago and I remember the weekend well. It was in the autumn of 2003, and the west coast of Florida was hunkering down for a hurricane warning. This was before 2004's hurricane season from hell. Back then, I never really understood how dangerous and damaging a hurricane could be. Within a year though, Hurricanes Charlie, Jeanne, Francis and Wilma would come along and beat the crap out of us and instill in me a profound respect for  the nightmare scenes the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean can throw at us here in the sunshine state.

So anyhow, in the fall of 2004 we were hunkering down to wait out another storm's passing and I planned to paint an accent wall in my living room to pass the time. Accent walls were all the rage then and the army man green I picked was very much on trend. There was a moment back then when black-greens were the last word. That moment passed about six months after I painted that wall.

I've groaned at the sight of that wall every time I've come home for the last four-and-a-half years and it is time. So how much paint to buy?

Well, I'll tell you. There's a rule of thumb when it comes to paint coverage and like all rules of thumb, it's a guideline more than it is a hard and fast rule.

A gallon of paint will cover 400 square feet of fully prepped and smooth wall. So take the area of the walls to be painted in square feet and divide by 400 and you'll know how many gallons you'll need. So measure the height and width of each wall in inches. Multiply those two numbers the divide the result by 144 and it will give you the area in square feet.

So a perfectly square room where each wall measured 10 feet by ten feet would give you 400 square feet of wall. A gallon of paint would paint a single coat on that whole room. A second coat would mean you'd double the gallons of paint you'd need. Make sense?

So now that I know how many gallons of paint I need, where do I go to get the motivation to actually paint?

The Process

By Judd Lord, guest blogger

Supposedly, Keith Richards dreamed the guitar riff of “Satisfaction.” He woke up, recorded himself playing the notes into a bedside tape recorder, and fell back asleep. What he had the next morning was a few seconds of guitar and an hour of snoring.

I don’t want to say I’ve had experiences similar to Keith’s but, as Paul has written in this very blog, I did get the idea for Brizo’s Venuto faucet line from the hair utensils worn by Japanese women during a good night of sake at a restaurant. That was a classic napkin sketch moment for me. Woke up the next day, pulled the crumpled thing out of my pocket and thought, “Huh? What was I supposed to do with this?!”

Design has to have a personal story or history to the designer. Delta's Victorian line grew out of a trip to New Orleans; take the top portion of the Victorian handle, turn it vertical and you will see the center of a fleur de lis. Brizo's Floriano was inspired by a dying flower in a vase. The aesthetic of water folding over itself in the Brizo Vesi channel was inspired by a section of stream in Minnesota where I used to vacation.

What’s even more important than the inspiration for design, though, is the collaboration of the design team. Every designer brings their own life experiences and perspectives to the table. Multiple people on the team provide input throughout the refinement process. It’s that collaboration and melding of perspectives that really make for a stronger overall design in the end.

Consumers of a product will choose one product over another based on a wide set of variables, something in the back of your head that makes you choose this one over that one – size, feel, weight, function, experience; tactile, auditory or aesthetic qualities. As designers we strive to pull more of the users' senses into the experience, to hit upon those intangibles. Every product is a solution to a problem, and it’s better to have more designs than fewer, the widest spread of solution sets to work with.

In other words, Keith Richards may have come up with the riff, but it took the rest of the Stones to turn that into “Satisfaction.” Most designers love this process, of collaborating on problems, of taking something from inspiration to completion. No one goes into the field wanting to design packaged goods or laser printers… no offense to laser printers. You go into design school thinking you want to design cars, but soon realize it’s the design process you love, the challenge of putting all the pieces together.

And believe me, working with something as intangible as water is a challenge. But it’s one I love, too.

Judd Lord began his career at Delta Faucet Company® over sixteen years ago. In 2000 he was appointed manager of industrial design with the challenge to establish Delta Faucet as a design and innovation forward company. In 2004 he was instrumental in laying out the groundwork for the Brizo portfolio, personally designing several of the initial marquee product suites in the fashion-forward brand. In 2006 he was made director of industrial design and continues to oversee creative direction for both the Brizo and Delta brands. Lord's passion for design and his ability to make an emotional connection with the consumer through product design has lead to hundreds of design patents and numerous design awards.

Meet Judd Lord tomorrow

The Venuto, designed by Judd Lord at Brizo

Judd Lord is the industrial design director for Brizo and Delta Faucets. He's a talented, insightful man I met him in New York last September.

Judd Lord, Jason Wu, me and Seth Fritz just hanging at a Fashion Week after show party. Impressed? You should be.

I'm beyond intrigued by industrial design and I'm particularly interested in learning about the process designers like Judd use to come up with new faucets and fixtures. Well, tune in tomorrow and he'll tell you himself. I had Judd write a guest post about his process. He and his process will show up more and more in 2010 and if you have any questions, feel free to leave them for him after his post tomorrow.