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The house has been dried in for a while and the interior finishes are starting to show up in force. One of the topics I discussed a while back were these custom mosaic wall panels that are getting installed in key locations throughout the project. The first one I covered was going up on the roof top terrace and I talked about it here. The other two locations are the Great Room fireplace surround and the wall behind the tub in the Master Bathroom. The first one here is obviously the fireplace surround – maybe it’s not obvious that it’s a fireplace but at the very least, you know it’s not a tub.

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The fireplace we are using is a 6′ direct vent Spark modern fireplace. They are very clean and suit the style of this home very well. To help you understand the scale of the Great Room, as well as the size of this mosaic surround, I included a partial interior elevation above. That is one of my infamous scale figures to the side – he’s 6′ tall. The overall dimensions of the surround is 12′-4″ long by 5′-6″ tall. This is a dynamic piece and once all the other finishes and cabinetry come together, I think everyone will be very excited by what they see.

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The artist who created these pieces for us is Ravenna born Italian mosaic artist Anna Fietta - and if you didn’t know, Ravenna, Italy is sometimes called the ‘mosaic city’ and  is renown for the beautiful 5th and 6th century mosaics that adorn the walls of its churches and monuments. Anna had to build all these mosaics on panels and ship them over to the contractor – so in the picture above, you can see an example of where the panels come together. Eventually these panels will be mortared into place, right now they are screwed to the wall to protect them from “walking” off the job site. Early next year (in 2012) Anna will fly over with a bag of smalti glass tiles to fill in the seams between the panels. The whole piece will flow together so that you won’t see any evidence that this large scale mosaic surround was anything other than one large installation.

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Since Anna is Italian – and has okay English language skills, and I only speak English (with a little international language of love thrown in), I relied on frequent quick sketches emailed back and forth to help her understand the specific size and shape that her panels needed to be. I also took advantage of Google translate more times than I can remember. I would write what I needed to say, plug it into the translate feature in Google and violá! A workable translation into Italian.

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Moving onto the Master Bathroom, this is the feature wall that will go behind the Victoria + Albert bath tub that is specified for this location. In this location, we did have a communication breakdown and the panels ended up being about 17″ too short for the space we needed. There is a light cove at the top of this wall and my original details (which were in English) said to “extend the finish into the light cove”. As a result, we have some more work for Anna to do for us. I spoke with the contractor and we were trying to decide if it would be easier to add the missing panel to the top or the bottom of the wall – we even did a quick profile cut-out of the tub so that we could see how the pattern would work (we were afraid that the silver wave would be too hidden once the tub was installed.

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I spoke with Anna and she said that the silver wave you see here is supposed to look like it is splashing down into the tub so unlike the photos you see here, these panels will move down to the floor. I redrew my original elevation of this wall to clearly convey to Anna the size of the missing area we needed to cover. This time, I ran some of my construction notes through Google translate and added them to my drawing (seen below).

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Here is another look at where 4 separate panels are coming together. All these areas will get filled in once Anna arrives.

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A look at the different smalti pieces – the ‘wave’ element in real life is far more vibrant and awesome than these photos show. I don’t like using the flash on my camera and since this room is on the interior of the house, there isn’t a lot of natural light making it’s way in and the contractor’s string of bulbs just isn’t set up for taking high quality photos – sorry.

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Here is a look up into the light cove above the Master Bathroom tub. To get the quality of light we want, as well as washing the wall for almost 10′, we are using a series of par lamps (think of it as a series of individual light fixtures) and as a result, the light cove is pretty tall (16″) and deep (12″). This is another area that I know will look fantastic. I would even bet that once the marketing people for Victoria + Albert see their tub sitting in front of this wall, they are going to fall out of their chairs.

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So that’s the update on the mosaic walls – I hope to feature some more of the finishes as they arrive on site. The house is coming together really quickly and I don’t want to bore anybody by focusing on this project too often – but you can let me know when I’m getting close.

Cheers

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