Custom Art Tile, Meet Fine Wood Furniture

The marriage between fine art tile and high end furniture has been a long time coming.
Customized imaging, a process with which you press images on tiles using a heat press, specially coated tiles and special dyes, has generally remained in the realm of Aunt Ethel’s photo on a tile (“We Love You Aunt Ethel!”) or the local football team on a tile mural. The process itself is rarely used for fine art.

Generally speaking, those who sell custom imaged tile and related substrates are not artists. The subtleties and skill required for quality tile creation, such as formidable digital art skills like designing from scratch, retouching, airbrushing, cropping, etc., are the exception rather than the rule.

When my husband and I opened our art tile company, we were intent on changing that tradition. Our numerous galleries of original art have succeeded in giving art-appreciating tile customers a formidable selection from which to choose, not to mention an unheard-of option: custom, “from-scratch” design.

What has also remained elusive was putting that custom imaged fine art tile on high end wood furniture. That option has never existed anywhere, because the very few available furniture pieces that are created to receive tile are made in a Pacific Rim assembly line. They are unexceptional, with boxy, uninspired lines. The wells routed out to receive the tile are never sized properly, often forcing the use of grout to awkwardly fill huge gaps on the sides. Additionally, tile furniture has been relegated to Walmart's low end patio furniture department.

That's why we've embarked on an unprecedented marriage between custom art tile and fine, hand-carved wood furniture, offering a ground-breaking concept: let the customer design their own fine furniture down to the leg, frame and cockbead, stain, finish and embedded art tile.From hand-carved armoires to luscious end tables to heirloom-worthy coffee tables, The Painted Forest has succeeded in taking both tile and fine furniture to a brand new level, something only fine art custom imaged tile could have achieved.

As far as Aunt Ethel goes, there are always going to be hundreds of people who can slap her photo on a tile. But the China Cabinet it’s displayed on---the one with the art nouveau stained glass parabolas artfully embedded in the cabinet doors--- is a different story altogether.

Mindy Sommers