23rd February - An tile-tastic discovery from 1912! (Patreon)

I wanted to let you know about an interesting discovery yesterday. To our delight it turned out that  that Benedicte had a very very rare original tile brochure from the time of our house (just one year later in 1912) and it has some of our tiles in it!! In fact given that the decoration may have take a year or two it is not unlikely that it was this very catalogue that the family looked at when choosing decorations.

It was a brochure used by sales reps at the time for a company called M. C. BUTSEMS & FRADERA.

This means we know for sure which company made our tiles.  

Here is a picture of the brochure and some of the floors inside compared to ours. Customers could choose their colours but as you can see the patterns are the same as ours.

To our surprise we also discovered that the tiles in our hall way (the ‘Escher’ style  3D ones) are not in fact newer additions as we had thought. They are also in the catalogue and Benedicte told us that they were being made from the late 19th century.

It was surprisingly emotional seeing this brochure with our tiles. We imagined the family perusing the catalogue choosing which ones they wanted.  It made the past all the more real to us.

It was a wonderful and uplifting trip for sure!  I felt very lucky as I just happened to see Benedicte's business flash up on Facebook and decided to email her.  She is going to come and visit Can  Punxes at some point too which will be really exciting!