he materials, the vision, the permanence

of the project you’re creating… this is something that is not going to be here today and gone tomorrow. There is always the possibility it will be here quite a long time, and will be true to that space and be spectacular at the same time. So, it’s a real challenge to make it absolutely wonderful,” Gladwin says. “There are so many dif-ferent textures and colors with the medium that you can play with that make it a really wonderful artistic medium to be able to work with. It’s very plastic in the sense of what you can bring into the project as far as the materials go, and what you can do with it to evoke the sense of different types of things.”

Gladwin, a Texas Licensed Interior Designer, an Allied Member of the American Institute of Archi-tects and a member of the Tile Heritage Foundation has worked exclusively with stone, glass, metal and ceramic tile since 1997, and specializes in custom mosaic design and assembly.

While Gladwin was fascinated with ceramics in art school, her chosen career was as an interior designer in San Antonio. “As an interior designer, I had more and more clients asking for interesting tile for their projects, and I just couldn’t get the information I needed. The people in the tile showrooms couldn’t re-ally tell us anything about what they were selling, and I needed to know because handmade tile is a very spe-cific product — and suddenly I saw a need for some-one with this interest and knowledge of ceramics.”

MAKING THE PIECES FIT

A happy dragon stamps its feet in the kitchen, anticipating the next hot meal. Rainbow-hued fish swim lazily amid the colorful reefs and corals of a lovely master bath. Tiles and glass combine to create a glittering reflection of the open sea, inviting diners in a restaurant to see themselves as not dining beside the ocean, but as part of the ocean itself. Mosaic and tile artist Rahnee Gladwin, Allied AIA, sees her world as a mosaic artist as one with infinite possibili-ties and outcomes — from helping create beautiful mosaic pieces for kitchens, baths and swimming pools to selecting tile for homes, restaurants and even a historic restoration work in Fredericksburg and a lighthouse in Port Aransas.

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RAHNEE GLADWIN’S MOSAIC CREATIONS PLAY WITH COLOR AND LIGHT

By JACKIE BENTON

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Photo by CASEY DUNN Photo by CASEY DUNN

URBAN HOME AUSTIN – SAN ANTONIO 73urbanhomemagazine.com

Gladwin’s hunch to pursue a niche as an interior designer who specializes in tile and mosaic arts has earned her the title of becoming the “go to” person when an architect or designer needs to create or source tile for a particular project. “I knew other interior designers needed my services because I needed my services. I could actually speak with interior designers on their level and knew the in’s and out’s of the trade,” Gladwin explains. “They could tell me the focus of their project, I could narrow down the choice selection to allow them to specify their choices, order the pieces and deliver it. That’s pretty much when I came up with ‘Dream it, Create it, Source it and Deliver it.’ That’s the focus of what I do.”

Some of those dreams have been very whimsical ones. A couple commissioned Gladwin to create a “happy dragon” for their kitchen. “Those clients came to me without a large budget and wanted the happy dragon in their kitchen,” laughs Gladwin. “Now, what a happy dragon could be is almost anything, so I re-searched dragons and presented them with a line drawing which they loved, filled it in with fun colors, and it is now an all-glass mosaic. I just took that idea and ran with it.”

Another fun project involved creating a reef environment for a master bath as part of a project from interior designer Robin Black, ASID / IIDA, of San Antonio. “The lady who was behind the project wanted to recreate the atmosphere from when she was a child and would snorkel in Tahiti. I fortunately had been to Tahiti and I knew what she was talking about — the incredible

colors of the fish and the reefs. She gave me full artistic license to do what I did, but she had final say. I showed her different fish I could put in and her husband had a couple of fish he definitely wanted. I did a lot of research on reefs and reef life, as well as the sourcing and how to incorporate the colors into the work. It was incredibly tiny, with each piece 3/8ths by 3/8ths, so it allowed for incredible detail.”

Other projects have been less whimsical, but no less creative. Gladwin worked with the architecture design firm Lake Flato in San Antonio for the Witte Museum to create a 10-ft by 12-ft mosaic tile piece called “The Maze” representing a Navajo rug from the museum’s collection in an open deck area. Gladwin has also been called upon to research and create historic-era terra-cotta tiles for a historic-style home in Fredericksburg, Texas, so that the house best represented the merging of Spanish and Ger-man styles popular at the time. “The tiles are all handmade and reflective of the Fredericksburg area at that particular era. You just could not take that tile away from that home and have it be the same thing,” she says. Another historic project has included the restoration of a lighthouse in Port Aransas for grocery mag-nate Charles Butt. Gladwin cherished traveling with interior designer Robin Black by boat to visit the lighthouse to ensure everything was historically accurate.

One of Gladwin’s latest projects is the Seaglass Restaurant in San Francisco, California. “I just finished working with Lund-berg Design to create custom glass blends of 4x8 tile on the back

wall of the restaurant that were reflective of the San Francisco Bay. That was a lot of fun — it was big and commercial and very exciting to provide something for such an open, public area. It really anchors the space to the bay, which is what we wanted to do. The walls are right against the San Francisco Bay, and then your eye swings over to the windows that look over the bay, and it’s a fabulous, incred-ible space.”

One of the challenges of Gladwin’s chosen medium is to create dimensionality, so that the mosaics have flow and seem to move across the surface of the wall or floor. “Mosaic doesn’t have to be a flat thing. While it is going on a flat wall, with certain tricks you can give it three dimensional qualities, and that’s what’s really fun. I’ll use stone, in both matte and polished finishes, glass and ceramic, and will combine all those things together on certain mosaics. For the underwater reef I did combine all three together to achieve the color saturation and also the surface color. Using glass added depth, so that your eye didn’t just stop at the surface of the color.

“I know we do a lot of mosaics, but I also enjoy playing with the design and using all tile aspects, so that you’re building into an image in a particular space in tile. That’s why I take it from the dream stage to the creation stage which is finding materials, sourcing them and making them into an actual thing or vision, and then delivering the pieces with instructions,” Gladwin says. “Although I prefer to do this all the way from start to finish, sometimes I can only direct people to materials and colors they want to use as a consultant.”

Narrowing down the choices has been an area where Glad-

win’s considerable knowledge and artistic vision has been a blessing for both interior designers and homeowners. “You need someone like me to say, ‘Here are the options we can pull from looking at your budget and here’s where we can go,’ and help

you find your way forward, as opposed to many people who go to the showrooms and get confused looking at the selec-tions, which are overwhelm-ing. If you have someone you can work with who knows the products, who knows what’s out there and knows your vision, it can save you time, effort, money and confusion,” she says.

“You want to know the vi-sion of the project and start working on finding those par-

ticular tiles so that your exterior tile and your interior tile will all flow together as a total unit. So many projects out there consider tile as an afterthought, particularly with residential properties, where they put so much energy into talking about the paint and the windows and the doors, but they don’t think about the tile. You want to make sure the whole project flows together and that you’ve got a tile design. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it could be off-the-shelf tile to high-end custom tile made just for you, but making sure that tile works with your project and what you have and is a reflection of what you want and your vision. You’re going to change your paint, you’re going to change your carpet, you’re going to change your furniture, but you’re going to be looking at your tile for 30 or so years.” v

RAHNEE GLADWIN R Gladwin i Design Tile210.859.9939 | Idesigntile.com

Courtesy of R GLADWIN / I DESIGN TILE

Photo by THOMAS MCCONNELL

Photo by THOMAS MCCONNELL Photo by DALE TAN

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