An idea to steal: cut tile

WHEN Warner Walcott and Jonn Coolidge bought the Encino house, the original pool had been decked over. They decided to bring it back.

“We had a look that we wanted,” Walcott says. “We decided on a smooth, seamless cap of poured concrete to edge the pool, but when we started looking for the tile to go beneath it, we weren’t able to find anything that worked.”

For inspiration, the couple looked at pictures of two homes by the same architect in a 1958 spread in the Los Angeles Times. One house had a marvelous fountain “covered in thin reflective slivers of tile that looked almost like piano keys,” Walcott says.

They went to Creative Environments in the Pacific Design Center. The showroom didn’t have the shape of tile they sought, but it did have larger 12-inch-square marble tiles that were the right translucent shades of blue and gray.

Walcott and Coolidge bought the larger tiles, then had them cut into short strips and fitted together in a rectilinear pattern similar to what they saw in the old photographs.

“We were thrilled with the result,” Walcott says. “It’s part replication, part reinvention, but it plays perfectly off the angles of the roof and complements the rectilinear nature of the house itself.”

-- Chris Iovenko