The new range will be showcased at a pop-up shop selling limited first edition products and prototypes at Pentagon Tile’s Leather Lane showroom between the 19th – 23rd September. The workshop team will be on hand during the week alongside expert specification consultants from Ardex providing technical advice and installation guidance for this unique new product.
Granby Workshop’s Encaustic Tiles are a reinvention of the traditional, coloured ceramic floor tile. Made from marbled, vitrified clay, the colours and patterns are not surface-applied but formed from the colours of the clay body itself, meaning that the patterns do not fade as they wear. Encaustic tiles were originally popularized by the Victorians, who valued their durability and vibrance, using them to pave the floors of many of that era’s grandest buildings.
Granby Workshop were interested in rethinking the encaustic tile by applying their unique, experimental manufacturing ethos to this historic process. Different colours of their custom clay body are marbled together and randomly combined before being flattened in a 60 tonne hydraulic press, meaning every tile is different.
The development of the process grew out of research into historic encaustic tile clay recipes and the invention of a modern equivalent, which is slip resistant and vitrifies at a low tem- perature, meaning less energy is used in its production. The tiles are suitable for internal and external use on floors and walls. They are frostproof, non-slip and available in a range of colours.
Alongside tiles, the new range will also include a limited run of Encaustic Tableware, pro- duced using the same distinctive encaustic clay body & using techniques developed through Granby Workshop’s extremely successful Splatware tableware range. These limited edition products will be available exclusively from the pop-up shop during LDF 19th – 23rd September.
