Did you know François and I are not just importers/retailers of antique European tile, wood and stone floors - but are also creators of antiqued tile? As artists, we are forever inspired to elevate our materials to recreate lost designs from centuries ago. Over the 25 years we have been in business, we have developed numerous antiqued terra cotta floor and wall tile collections. Creating and using our hands is a shared passion and its something we do best as a couple. Where I create/design or paint collections, François brings my collections to life. Our most recent collection is our Catalan Farmhouse 1850 - A Small Production Antiqued Cement Tile Collection.
This was the first time we developed an antiqued cement tile collection. I chose 3 designs that I redrew from original Spanish 1850 motifs. The choice of colors for this collection was limitless, but I wanted the collection to feel organic and close to nature, so I chose an earth toned color palette. From there we partnered with a small atelier in Catalonia, Spain where artisans make each cement tile by hand, starting with the hand-forged metal frame. Finally, by hand, we antique each tile in our Massachusetts facility. This accelerates the patina to look and feel historic. How many hands have touched these tiles are hard to count, but we succeeded in bringing history back to life from Spain 1850.
Since 2000, our tile collections have been driven by a deep passion for handmade European terra cotta tile and historic tile design. From the very beginning, our focus has been on creating artisanal terra cotta tile flooring and glazed wall tile collections rooted in centuries-old European craftsmanship. Using our imported handmade terra cotta tiles as a canvas, we developed multiple heritage-inspired collections that emphasize patina, texture, and authentic Old World character.
Twenty-five years ago, interior design trends favored contemporary, minimalist spaces—white-on-white kitchens, expansive smooth surfaces, and glass tile backsplashes. In that climate, historic tile and handmade terra cotta floors were often misunderstood and overlooked. The time, labor, and artistry required to create these collections—without widespread appreciation for what they represented—became challenging. We could not, and would not, compete with the white-on-white kitchen aesthetic.
Yet a small group of discerning clients installed these remarkable handmade terra cotta floors in their homes. Today, those same floors are highly sought after, as homeowners and designers rediscover the beauty of authentic materials, artisanal craftsmanship, and historic surface character.
François and I have never worked from trends. Interior design trends are cyclical—but our devotion to historic European materials has always remained steady and timeless. This philosophy continues to guide everything we create at Pavé Tile & Stone, Inc..
Below is one of my favorite antiqued terra cotta floor tile collections we developed. To explore additional retired and archival collections, visit Pinterest and search Pavé Tile & Stone, Inc.
One of the first collections we created was The Montmartre Antiqued Terra Cotta Tile Flooring Collection, which is shown above. Using our antiqued French terra cotta tiles, we painstakingly succeeded after a few years, in glazing my inspired encaustic designs from 16th century France onto our terra cotta tiles. We even had our own kiln made for this purpose - where we worked with engineers to devise a large enough kiln to fire our clay tile. We had many motifs and 3 kiln-fired glaze colors, the olive you see above, a black and an antique white. I loved this collection, but when we decided to no longer offer it, I turned it into a decorative wall tile line. I painted the motifs for our 5" x 5" glazed wall tile and changed the name to the Gardens in the Cloister 16th Century French Encaustic Tile.
French encaustic tile inspired by 16th-century French museum motifs defines this hand-painted tile collection. My love for historic French encaustic design is boundless, and for this series I envisioned a dreamlike landscape from a time when nature was revered as refuge—when the natural world offered solace amid the hardships of medieval life.
Each hand-painted motif is drawn from original 16th-century museum pieces and reflects the distinctive language of early French encaustic patterning: simplified, direct, and emotionally resonant. There is an urgency and clarity in these historic designs—communicating straight to the heart without excess ornamentation. Stars, flowers, forest creatures, and farm animals are rendered with restrained line, minimal modeling, and honest expression, allowing every motif to remain legible, powerful, and timeless.
Installed as a kitchen backsplash and paired with one of our antiqued French oak floors, this French encaustic tile collection becomes a quiet love poem to 16th-century France—celebrating heritage craftsmanship, historic artistry, and the enduring beauty of handmade European tile.
Antiqued French oak flooring created through traditional oxidation aging defines our signature wood floor collections. Our antiqued French oak floors are among the most vetted and celebrated products we offer at Historic Decorative Materials. Each plank is produced using a specialized oxidation method that ages the oak from the inside out—replicating the depth, patina, and tonal complexity of centuries-old wood.
European artisans follow a meticulous 7–10 step process, finishing every plank by hand. The resulting matte patina, tactile texture, and translucent layering of color are extraordinary—so authentic that our antiqued French oak floors are often indistinguishable from original reclaimed French oak.
We currently offer four distinct antiqued French oak flooring collections, each designed to instantly transform interiors into historic, Old World masterpieces with warmth, depth, and enduring European character.
Antiqued Delft tiles and Cuisine de Monet wall tiles anchor this blog as two signature historic decorative tile collections. Both collections are deeply rooted in European historic interior design and were conceived from a desire to create hand-painted wall tiles that honor original motifs while expressing my own artistic voice.
For the Antiqued Delft collection, I remained faithful to 17th-century Dutch tile traditions. For the Cuisine de Monet wall tiles—drawn from the world of Claude Monet—I studied historic French decorative references and painterly sensibilities associated with classic European kitchens. While true to historical sources, each tile carries the subtle individuality that naturally emerges from the hand of the artist.
The historical significance of these tile traditions within European interior design is profound. Understanding their origins—how and why these motifs were created—deepens appreciation for their beauty, cultural meaning, and enduring relevance. These historic decorative wall tiles are not merely surface finishes; they are living expressions of European artistic heritage translated into handcrafted ceramic form.
Delft tiles originate from the arrival of Chinese blue & white porcelain into the Netherlands during the Dutch Golden Age. Beginning in 1602, the Dutch East India Company became a dominant force in global trade, importing prized commodities from the East Indies into the growing ports of Amsterdam—first spices, then tea, coffee, textiles, and ultimately Chinese porcelain.
It was this blue-and-white porcelain—celebrated for its delicacy, translucency, and durability—that profoundly influenced Dutch art and ceramic traditions. Vast shipments of Chinese porcelain inspired Dutch potters to develop their own ceramic counterpart, giving rise to what became known as Delftware: a distinctive tin-glazed earthenware that visually echoed porcelain while remaining technically unique.
Rather than simply copying Chinese ceramics, Dutch artisans adapted the aesthetic into a new artistic language. Without access to kaolin clay, Dutch potters used local clays and applied a tin glaze that, once fired, produced a white, opaque surface resembling porcelain. From this foundation, they developed a recognizable style—painting traditional Dutch motifs such as florals, landscapes, nautical scenes, and craftsmen engaged in daily life. The hallmark characteristics of historic Delft tiles became clear: blue & white palettes, narrative imagery, and finely painted scenes of ordinary existence.
During the 17th century Dutch Golden Age, Delftware experienced enormous popularity, including decorative wall tiles. Both Delft and Amsterdam emerged as important centers of tile production. Delft tiles were widely installed around fireplaces, in kitchens, and throughout domestic interiors, contributing to their spread across the Netherlands and into broader European design culture.
Today, interior designers and homeowners once again value the historic authenticity and artistic depth of hand-painted Delft tiles. Their calming blue & white pictorials function as visual time capsules of 17th-century Dutch life, bringing Old World elegance, narrative richness, and enduring beauty to a wide range of interiors—from French farmhouse kitchens to English manor houses and classic period homes.
Our antiqued Delft tile collection was created to extend the historic tradition of 17th-century Dutch Delft tiles through authentic hand-painted craftsmanship. Inspired directly by original 17th century Delft tile motifs, I painted each design in traditional Delft blue—a pigment intrinsically tied to historic Delftware and blue & white Dutch ceramics.
Field tile color options for our antiqued Delft tiles include Historic White and Vintage Warm White. Historic White replicates the classic tin-glaze white used by Dutch potters in 17th-century Amsterdam, recreating the crisp, luminous ground of original Delft tiles.
For interiors incorporating antique flooring and historic materials, we developed a second option: Vintage Warm White. This warm white field tile carries a softer, aged tonality with an antique presence, allowing Delft tiles to integrate more harmoniously with reclaimed stone, terra cotta, and aged wood surfaces.
All imagery shown in this blog and on the Antiqued Delft Tile Collection page features Delft tiles produced on the Vintage Warm White field tile, demonstrating its depth, warmth, and Old World character.
Our antiqued Delft tiles are designed to pair seamlessly with historic European flooring to create authentic Old World interiors. One of the great strengths of this collection is its ability to integrate beautifully with our heritage floor materials—resulting in spaces that feel layered, timeless, and genuinely European.
A classic example is the pairing of antiqued Belgian bluestone flooring with a Delft tile fireplace surround. Together, the blue & white narrative tiles and the aged stone floor create a living space of quiet grandeur, historic depth, and enduring elegance.
By combining antiqued Delft tiles with historic wood, stone, and terra cotta floors, interiors achieve a cohesive Old World aesthetic rooted in centuries-old European design traditions—never trend-driven, always timeless.
Reclaimed French terra cotta tile flooring is one of our core specialties and most rare offerings. We focus exclusively on salvaging authentic antique French reclaimed terra cotta tiles—materials that are increasingly scarce and exceptionally difficult to source. Only the most beautiful, character-rich, and historically worthy lots are selected.
Once salvaged, these antique terra cotta tiles are imported to the United States and carefully cleaned and calibrated at our facility in West Hatfield, ensuring they are installation-ready while preserving their historic patina, surface texture, and aged edges.
For those seeking an authentic English country kitchen or European-inspired interior, pairing French reclaimed terra cotta tile flooring with an antiqued Delft tile kitchen backsplash creates a space of timeless beauty, historic depth, and Old World authenticity—an interior that will remain forever relevant and enduring.
Antique English limestone flooring with 200-year-old patina defines timeless European kitchen design. These historic limestone floors display layered surface character, aged edges, and nuanced color variations that only centuries can create.
Imagine antique English limestone as a kitchen floor, paired with an antiqued Delft tile backsplash and a black La Cornue range—an English country house aesthetic rooted in authenticity, warmth, and enduring beauty. This classic combination creates an interior that transcends trends, carrying its historic presence and quiet elegance through generations.
Antique black & white checkerboard flooring is a hallmark of Old World European interior design. These classic checkerboard floors create bold, graphic statements that have endured for centuries in historic European homes.
When paired with antiqued Delft tiles, the contrast is striking. The strong geometry of black & white checkerboard floors set against the soft, narrative imagery of blue & white Delft tiles creates a compelling visual tension—one that feels both dynamic and harmonious.
Together, these two historic materials reawaken the spirit of 17th-century Dutch interior design, producing interiors rich in contrast, depth, and timeless European character.
Cuisine de Monet wall tiles inspired by the iconic kitchen tiles in Claude Monet’s home in Giverny define this second hand-painted decorative tile collection. My deep love for French country interiors—combined with an understanding of their historic roots and how beautifully they pair with French reclaimed terra cotta tile flooring—immediately sparked the vision for this series.
This collection was created as an homage to classic French kitchen tile traditions, capturing the quiet charm, painterly softness, and timeless elegance associated with Monet’s legendary interiors. Designed to complement historic French terra cotta floors, these hand-painted wall tiles bring warmth, artistry, and authentic French country character into period and heritage-inspired spaces.
Claude Monet’s kitchen tiles in Giverny represent one of the most celebrated examples of 19th-century French blue & white decorative tile. While Monet is universally known as the father of Impressionism and the master of painting light, his kitchen has also become iconic in its own right—recognized for its bold use of color, pattern, and historic ceramic tradition.
A world traveler, Monet may have drawn inspiration for fully tiled walls from the Middle East, where ceramic-clad interiors were commonplace. His desire for blue & white tiles ultimately led him to Rouen in the 19th century. Rouen had been a major center for faience production since the 1540s, with its most influential period lasting through the mid-18th century. The tiles installed in Monet’s kitchen are known as blue Rouen faience tiles.
These French tiles were influenced by Chinese blue & white kraak porcelain that entered Europe through global trade routes and arrived in large quantities via Amsterdam in the 17th century, largely through the efforts of the Dutch East India Company. While Dutch Delftware helped popularize blue & white ceramics across Europe, Monet’s kitchen tiles belong firmly to the Rouen tradition.
Both Delftware and Rouen faience share technical similarities—an opaque white tin glaze with cobalt-blue decoration—but their decorative languages differ significantly. Dutch Delft tiles often depict narrative scenes of 17th-century daily life, landscapes, and maritime activity. Rouen faience, by contrast, is characterized by bold geometric patterning, rhythmic repetition, and strong graphic structure.
Monet embraced these geometric traditions and elevated them into something unforgettable. In his kitchen, he installed patchwork tile patterns above the range, and a centered decorative motif within a framed border on the hood—creating a composition that feels deliberate, painterly, and alive.
The beauty of Monet’s French country home extends far beyond the kitchen. His fearless use of color, instinct for pattern, and mastery of composition—across tiles, gallery walls, furniture, and gardens—creates a total environment of immersive beauty. Not shy with color, nor bound by conventional palettes, Monet’s home stands as a testament to his extraordinary eye and his ability to orchestrate color into transcendent, timeless harmony.
Together, Monet’s kitchen tiles represent an enduring reference point for French blue & white decorative tile—uniting historic ceramic tradition, bold design, and artistic vision in one of the most beloved interiors in the world.
Claude Monet’s Yellow Dining Room at Giverny
The next two images showcase Claude Monet’s iconic yellow dining room—a masterclass in historic French interior color, emotion, and composition. This butter-yellow hue (notably aligned with 2025’s renewed embrace of warm, optimistic color) envelops the space in warmth and joy, creating an immediate sense of comfort and visual harmony.
The yellow walls and furnishings anchor the room, allowing the eye to move fluidly across surfaces, chairs, and architectural details. This unified color field gave Monet the freedom to introduce a bold geometric red & white checkerboard floor—establishing striking contrast through pattern and texture.
Together, the saturated yellow envelope and graphic checkered flooring demonstrate Monet’s instinctive understanding of balance: softness against structure, warmth against geometry, and color against form. The result is a timeless French country interior that feels both exuberant and grounded—an enduring source of inspiration for historic European interiors today.
Blue & white kitchen tiles at Claude Monet’s home in Giverny reveal a masterful orchestration of color, pattern, and emotional continuity. Blue is quietly introduced before one ever enters the kitchen—appearing in the tiled fireplace surround and reemerging in the flowing blue water motifs of his Japanese woodblock prints displayed throughout the home. This repetition gently anchors the eye and prepares the viewer to receive blue again in the kitchen. Without this visual prelude, stepping suddenly into an entirely blue & white tiled kitchen could feel abrupt or discordant.
And then we arrive at Monet’s famous blue & white tiled kitchen.
Layer upon layer of geometric blue & white decorative wall tiles from Rouen cover the walls—paired with a black range and a French terra cotta hexagon tile floor—creating one of the most iconic kitchens in design history. The visual impact is breathtaking.
The beauty of Monet’s kitchen is difficult to explain intellectually; it is felt more than analyzed. As humans, we are innately drawn to pattern, rhythm, and repetition. Monet instinctively understood this, composing a kitchen that functions as both living space and immersive artwork.
It is this extraordinary marriage of historic French blue & white tile, geometry, and emotional resonance that inspired me to replicate a version of this pattern language for our own company—honoring the Rouen tradition while translating its timeless beauty into a new hand-painted decorative wall tile collection.
The genius of Claude Monet’s blue & white kitchen tiles lies in their restraint—only five distinct decorative motifs. These motifs range from bold to soft, geometric to floral, offering just enough variation to refresh the eye while allowing each tile to be appreciated individually. When installed together, they form an organic, rhythmic pattern that feels alive rather than mechanical.
A single motif repeated in a linear sequence naturally becomes a border tile, while alternating motifs create the classic Rouen-style decorative field—demonstrating how simplicity, repetition, and proportion achieve extraordinary visual impact.
For our Cuisine de Monet wall tile collection, I painted each motif as faithfully to the original French tiles as possible. Using an historic French blue pigment, the designs are fired in our kilns onto glazed bisque tiles in either warm white or cool white. After firing, each tile is individually hand-crackled to produce a softly crazed surface that replicates the aged, porcelain-like character of antique French faience.
The result is a hand-painted blue & white decorative wall tile collection that honors 19th-century French ceramic traditions while offering authentic historic character, depth, and timeless beauty for period and heritage interiors.
French terra cotta hexagon tile flooring paired with blue & white decorative wall tiles defines the quintessential French country kitchen. It is therefore no surprise that Claude Monet chose handmade French terra cotta hexagon tiles for the floor of his kitchen.
The warmth, texture, and earthy patina of handmade French clay tile flooring create a perfect counterpoint to the crisp, graphic beauty of blue & white decorative wall tiles. Together, these two historic materials form a harmonious balance of softness and structure, earth and pigment, tradition and artistry.
The marriage of French terra cotta tile floors with blue & white French decorative tiles remains one of the most timeless combinations in European interior design—creating kitchens that feel authentic, soulful, and eternally beautiful.
This blog concludes with two hand-painted blue & white decorative tile collections: our Antiqued Delft Tile Collection and our Cuisine de Monet Tile Collection. While both are rooted in historic European ceramic traditions, each evokes a distinctly different emotional and aesthetic response.
Both collections share a common origin story—European artisans inspired by Chinese kraak porcelain imported into Amsterdam during the 17th century by the Dutch East India Company. From this global exchange emerged two extraordinary artistic traditions: Dutch Delftware and French faience.
Yet through their individual cultures—one Dutch, one French—and through each artist’s unique creative lens, two defining and profoundly beautiful historic tile languages were born. Dutch Delft tiles evolved toward narrative storytelling and scenes of daily life, while French blue & white tiles, as exemplified by Claude Monet’s kitchen, embraced geometry, rhythm, and pattern-driven composition.
Although interior design trends inevitably come and go, historic interiors built on pattern, color, and authentic antique materials endure. For those who love historic European interior design, the emotional resonance of these spaces—the way they feel, not just how they look—matters most.
For me, antiqued Delft tiles and Monet-inspired blue & white tiles will always feel relevant. They transcend fashion. They represent timeless artistry, cultural lineage, and the enduring beauty of hand-painted historic tile.
Emmi Micallef
Co-Founder, Historic Decorative Materials
Comments will be approved before showing up.
Explore the architectural history of black-and-white checkerboard flooring—from ancient civilizations to European châteaux—and discover how this iconic pattern has endured for centuries as a symbol of order, beauty, and craftsmanship. Learn why its bold geometry pairs beautifully with reclaimed French oak, aged limestone, Belgian bluestone, and hand-painted Delft tiles, and how these historic European materials come together to create layered, timeless luxury interiors rooted in heritage and artistry.
Antique Delft tiles embody 17th century Dutch artistry, history, and timeless European design. Reminiscing on my love for Delft tile brought me back to childhood while visiting Amsterdam this past summer with my family.
Historically undeniable, antique Delft tiles have adorned interiors ranging from grand châteaux to humble farmhouses—always carrying the poetic charm and narrative spirit of 17th-century Amsterdam. Rethink the ubiquitous white subway tile, and instead invite art, history, and storytelling into your home by installing antique Delft tiles that bring authentic European character and enduring beauty to interiors.
A French artisan’s journey from the forests of Western Massachusetts to founding a premier showroom for French, Belgian, Italian & English reclaimed flooring—uniting craftsmanship, heritage, and rare European materials under one roof.
