The Most Expressive, Eye-Popping Floor Tiles You ll Find Anywhere
When it comes to Italian tiles, we’re floored.
By Tim McKeough Douglas Friedman
The trattoria was nothing special, but its floor grabbed my attention. After a day strolling the Mediterranean beach and cobbled lanes of Italy’s Sestri Levante, I was hunting for an
aperitivo when I saw it a decades-old composition of hexagonal tiles with a diamond pattern in three colors that created an illusory three-dimensional field of cubes. That such a graphic statement was present in a timeworn trattoria, where sandy shoes and sloshed Negronis ruled, was unexpected. But in Italy, a country that has a long history of producing dramatic tile, it usually doesn’t take long to find inspiration underfoot.
Francesco Dolfo
Like many couples during the current pandemic, Mauro Guerini and Jürgen Hilow-Iwaszura have been playing the dual roles of romantic partner and coworker in the context of their relationship. But unlike many couples, Guerini and Hilow-Iwaszura have a decade’s worth of practice in this juggling act. Since 2010, they have been co-owners (along with a third business partner) of the Milan hair salon Sarah Hilow: Guerini handles the administrative side, while Hilow-Iwaszura focuses on the creative elements. Their success with this work-life duality is the result of considerable discipline. “Our rule from day one has been that when we walk out the salon door, work is over,” says Hilow-Iwaszura, who, like Guerini, was born and raised in Johannesburg, where the two met and began dating 20 years ago. “Whatever needs to be said about work can wait for the morning after. And work happens in Italian. But when we come home, we switch to speaking English.”