London calling: Tom Dixon’s architecture-inspired tile collection for Bisazza

Italian tile brand Bisazza only launched its new Cementiles collections in September last year but it has already racked up an impressive line of collaborators, with Jaime Hayon, Carlo Dal Bianco, Paola Navone and India Mahdavi all having conjured their own distinctive Cementiles collections for the brand. And now, to mark the tenth anniversary of Bisazza’s London showroom, British designer Tom Dixon joins the stable with a collection inspired by London’s red clay bricks, cracked pavements and pebble dash walls.

’London – our home city – provides all the inspiration we need for this new collection of surfaces; the building blocks and the textures of this thousand-year-old city are imprinted in this designer’s mind,’ says Dixon. ’Bricks of red clay, cracked pavements and pebble dash walls, the signatures of a crumbling capital in constant re-invention are reworked in a graphic, pop art style to suit the simplicity demanded by the century-old tile manufacturing process.’

A diversification from the tile brand’s traditional glass mosaics, the Cementiles are a contemporary interpretation of the cement tiles that were typically used in the palaces and mansions of nobility during the second half of the 1800s and early 1900s. Bisazza’s contemporary versions are all handmade in Tunisia using a cement mix that has been rigorously developed to create tiles with a soft and silky texture.

In addition to Dixon’s new offerings, Bisazza will also launch a new mosaic collection with Studio Job, expand upon existing ranges with Patricia Urquiola, Marcel Wanders and Carlo Dal Bianco, and debut its ‘Wood’ collection – a new line of oak tiles, available in four colours: naturale, cuoio, marron glacè and moka.