client installation
A Decorative Tiled Archway
In remodeling a 1920’s Spanish-style bungalow in Los Angeles, designer Caitlin Murray of Black Lacquer Design didn’t shy away from drama. On the contrary, she embraced the home’s architectural details and wrapped an ornately carved passageway in tile to accentuate it, rather than simply rounding or squaring it off.
Highlighting the transition between the kitchen and laundry/mudroom, Murray clad the archway in Hanley Hand Cut field tiles and Quarter Round trim in Wheat, and lined either side with Mottled tiles in Green. The rich palette was chosen to correspond with the veining in the kitchen’s Alabaster Egiziano countertops and the foliage in the mudrooms’ House of Hackney wallpaper - green is a mercurial colour so it reads as a bold accent in the mudroom and as a neutral in the kitchen.
“What’s great about this tile moment is that it doesn’t ignore the transition. It could have been an eyesore if someone just painted the archway white,” explains Murray. We couldn’t agree more — here’s to more tiled archways!
Photography by Jessica Alexander
“We wanted to do something special because that was the original archway. I wanted to play it up and lean into that as an architectural feature.”
