Inside Houzz: An Art Mosaic Wall Banishes Dining Room Gloom
When Ed and Marie Keens moved from New Jersey to Southern California, they figured their lives would suddenly be filled with sunshine and light. But a tour of condominiums for sale proved otherwise.
“Every unit I saw in San Diego was dark,” says Marie, a retired New Jersey port employee. “It wasn’t my idea of what California should be.”
The couple finally settled on a 10th-floor condominium with a view of the city, but even that felt drab, with its gray concrete walls, dark granite counters and cold steel appliances.
Marie figured there had to be some way to banish the gloom, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “I knew I wanted something unique, but I didn’t know what I wanted,” she says. Then she spied a photograph on Houzz that took her breath away.
The image depicted a sparkling bathroom designed around a fused-glass mosaic of a dogwood branch. Even though the artisans, Designer Glass Mosaics, were more than 2,000 miles away in Charlotte, North Carolina, Marie gave them a call.
“Houzz is our biggest source of leads,” says Tom Snyder, who runs the business with his wife, Saundra. The Snyders assured the Keenses that distance wouldn’t be a problem.
“He said he could do anything that we wanted,” recalls Marie. “He was happy to send us samples of the different colors. He was willing to send us glass tiles so we could see the difference in the tiles.”
Ed and Marie asked the Snyders to create a dogwood mosaic large enough to fill an entire wall of their dining room. “I was trying to make my unit happy and peaceful,” Marie says.
The Keenses sent the artisans a photograph of the room, and in return received a digital rendering (shown here) showing the glass mural superimposed over the wall.
To get the artwork to blend with its surroundings, the Snyders used back-painted glass for the field tile and asked the couple to select a paint color that complemented their decor. Over the next five weeks, the Snyders emailed progress shots like this one and snail-mailed a sample tile, so that Ed and Marie could gauge the color of the back-painted glass and see what the dogwood relief would look like in three dimensions.
When the work was finished, the Snyders numbered every tile, packed them in custom-made crates affixed to a pallet, and shipped the tiles across the country.
“All the tiles came perfectly — except one that came chipped,” recalls Marie. “And they sent a new tile right away.”
It took just a day for a tile setter to install the 8- by 11-foot mural, fitting the numbered pieces together like a puzzle.
The seafoam field tiles and snowy dogwood blossoms reflect the light and animate the dining room, filling the space with cheer.
“I would never have thought of this on my own,” says Marie, who admits she once stayed up all night looking at photos on Houzz. “It’s a wonderful site. You have an idea that you want something, but Houzz helps you decide concretely on what you want.”
Marie says the mural is surprisingly easy to clean and garners compliments all the time. “There is not a person who doesn’t walk in and say, ‘That is awesome,’” Marie enthuses. “Everybody notices it.”
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