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RENOVATOR’S TOOLBOX
Styles changed in the 1920s with the rise of apartment
buildings. Old tile has rectified edges - field tiles are
completely flat with square corners, for example - and
is installed tightly with narrow grout lines measuring
one-sixteenth of an inch or less. Modern tile has eased
(rounded) edges and wider grout lines such as oneeighth
of an inch. Sources for old-fashioned rectified
tiles with narrow spacing include American Restoration
Tile in Mabelvale, Ark., Heritage Tile’s Subway Ceramics
in Verona, Wisc., and L’Esperance Tile Works in
Rock City Falls, N.Y.
American Restoration Tile offers both custom and
off the shelf tile, including unglazed tile in hexagon,
square, and other shapes for the floor. Glazed wall
or square tile glazed in white or cream. The frieze of
decorative embossed tile above it, usually set at about
shoulder height, might be the same white or cream as
the wall tile or splotched with pastel glazes in colors such
as pink and yellow or aqua. Grout colors were typically
shades of white or gray. Apart from visiting a lot of
old houses and eyeing real estate listings, a good visual
source of examples is the book “Bungalow Bathrooms”
by Jane Powell.
In Brooklyn, such tiled bathrooms were common in
single-family townhouses from about 1880 to 1920. In the
1890s, the two-family and three-family townhouses that
started to appear in Brooklyn had much smaller bathrooms
with beadboard walls and wood floors but no tile.
A bathroom illustration in a 1911 J. L. Mott Iron Works catalog shows a high dado of square field tile sandwiched between strips of
tile in a contrasting color. It is topped with a tile frieze of garlands and ribbons. From the collection of the New York Public Library.