The new restrooms at Centennial Park have a tile wall in them that I'm still not over.
Elizabeth Williams at New Hat designed the whole thing — the shapes, the way they nest, every color, and the mounting layout that made it buildable. We made it and mounted it in our shop on Atlas Drive, about three miles from where it stands now. Dryden is the architect on the project.
I want to tell you how it came together, because it's the best kind of project we get to do, and I'd like more of them.
Photos by Kelsey Hall
It started somewhere else entirely
Elizabeth walked us through her client presentation and her inspiration, and where she'd started was Japanese tessellated tile. It was incredible. It was also, at the scale of that wall, a problem — the number of unique pieces it would have taken was going to break the job.
So we sat down together and got into it. What sizes were realistic. How many distinct shapes we could reasonably make and keep straight. Where the line was between ambitious and unbuildable.
What came out of that conversation was the snowflake pattern that's on the wall today, built as a mounted mosaic instead of large, unusual-shaped tile. Elizabeth's design, arrived at through a real back-and-forth about what clay and a kiln will actually do. I think it's better than where either of us started.
That's the part I'd want a designer to take from this. We're not going to tell you no. We're going to tell you what's true about the material, and then help you find the version of your idea that survives contact with a production floor.
About Elizabeth
Elizabeth Williams - Principal New Hat/ Photo by Andrea Behrends
I've worked with New Hat on a lot of things now — custom tile for our friends at Powell Architects, a pizza oven for Folk that I still think about. Every time she brings us something, it's a completely different approach to tile than how I would ever design it.
Her color sense is the thing. Sometimes she'll bring me a palette and I'll look at it and think, I don't know if that works. Then it comes out of the kiln and it's brilliant. Every single time. She is genuinely one of the most talented designers working in this country right now, and I don't say that loosely.
And this project wasn't just a beautiful idea handed off to us. She and her team worked out the full layout — which color goes where across thirty-some feet of wall, how the density shifts, how it all gets mapped so a person could actually build it sheet by sheet. That's not design in the pretty sense. That's design carried all the way through to the last piece of tape. The technical ambition matches the visual ambition, and that combination is rare.
The hard part was the waiting
By the time it was done, that wall was 8,880 individual pieces in eighteen colors, across five shapes we had to cut new dies to make. And you can't mount a pattern like this as you go. Every sheet is a specific slice of a color gradient running across the room, and you can't build any one of them until you can put your hands on every color it calls for. So we couldn't start mounting until every last tile was glazed and fired. If one color came up short, everything stopped.
The shop turned into a staging ground and stayed that way — sorted, laid out, waiting. Then Mars mounted it. All 793 sheets, one after another, against the layout, coordinating every shape and every color, then packing the finished sheets in the order the installers would need to pull them. It's painstaking work and she did it beautifully.
The reason this worked is that Elizabeth gave us real lead time. We knew going in that this one would take longer, so we ran our normal production alongside it instead of clearing the decks and panicking. Good partners make good projects possible.
Why the park part matters to me
I'm at a point in my career where I want to give back.
Beautiful tile has been enjoyed in public for centuries — that's most of the history of this material, honestly. Bathhouses, train stations, churches, market halls. The private house is the newer idea. So there's something that feels right about a wall like this being in a park, where anyone can walk in and stand in front of it without buying anything or being invited.
We feel some of this with hospitality work too, which is part of why we love it. It's tile we get to go visit — dinner somewhere, a night in a hotel, and there it is. But a park belongs to everybody, and that's a different feeling.
I'd like to do a lot more of it. If you're working on a civic project, a park, a library, a transit space — anywhere somebody had to make the case that a public room deserved better than the default — call us. We can cut new dies, match a color you found outside, build the jig, run the layout, and pack it so your installer's first morning goes smoothly.
Next time you're in Centennial Park, go find the restrooms. I'm not kidding.
Design: New Hat. Architecture: Dryden. Tile made and mounted by Red Rock Tileworks in Nashville, Tennessee.
Working on a custom or public project? Talk with a tile maker.