What reclaimed actually means here
These pieces were hand-made clay tiles in Spanish farmhouses, courtyards and town buildings. When those buildings came down, the floors were lifted, cleaned and sorted rather than broken up.
So the variation in them is a record of use. A piece that sat under a doorway wore differently from one that sat under a table, and the color runs from a pale weathered terracotta to a deep red depending on where in the original floor it was.
Unglazed clay, and what that means
Natural is the finish on almost this whole range, which on a terracotta means unglazed: the fired clay body with nothing on top of it.
That is why the color is so even in character and so varied in tone. There is no glaze to carry a pigment, so the color is the clay itself, and clay from different pits and different firings lands in a different place on the red-to-orange range.
The sizes were never standard
6x6, 8x8, 6x12, 4x4, 3x12, 5x10 and a set of frankly irregular dimensions including a 6 3/4x6 1/2 and an 8 3/4x11 3/4, with one listed simply as random.
None of those is a modern format and that is the point. Hand-made tiles were cut to whatever the mold and the shrinkage produced, and a reclaimed floor carries the sizes of the building it came out of rather than the sizes a factory settled on later.
Three quarters of an inch thick
Most of this range is 3/4 inch, with pieces at 1 1/4 inch, which is two to three times the thickness of an ordinary modern tile.
Hand-made clay was thick because it had to be: a thinner piece would not have survived the making, the drying or the firing. It is the single figure to settle before anything else, because a 3/4 inch floor meeting a 3/8 inch one leaves a substantial step.
The trim and the patterns
Moldings and a pattern set sit in this range alongside the field tiles, which is unusual for reclaimed material.
A pattern set is several sizes supplied together to be laid as a repeating module, which is how many original terracotta floors were arranged. The trim pieces matter because a reclaimed floor has no modern series to borrow an edge from.
Why the irregularity is the product
A reclaimed terracotta floor is not flat, not square and not consistent, and every one of those is a reason people buy it.
A new machine-made terracotta can copy the color and the texture and it cannot copy fifty years of feet. What it produces is a tile that looks handmade; what this is, is a floor that was. The difference shows most at the edges of a room, where the original wear pattern ran out and the pieces come up sharper than the ones from the middle.
Where reclaimed terracotta goes
A kitchen, a hall, a garden room, a courtyard, a farmhouse floor and anywhere a new building is trying to feel older than it is.
Terracotta tile holds the newly made version of the same material, and cement tile the other unfired traditional floor.
