Cloisonné

Marble, onyx, brass and glass enamel, set by hand into one mosaic: an ancient jeweler’s craft made at the scale of a floor or a wall, in twenty designs or your own.

Cloisonné mosaic is drawn in metal. Fine brass lines outline every petal, leaf and curve, and each space between them is filled with polished stone or a fired glass enamel. The result reads like inlaid jewelry: crisp lines of gold, deep enamel color and the natural veining of the marble, all polished into one flat, smooth surface.

It suits a powder room floor, a bar front, a feature wall or a hotel lobby medallion. Designs below are made to order in their shown colors, and any of them can be recolored or redrawn. Send us a drawing, a fabric or a photo and we will turn it into a cloisonné design for your room.

Allow about 8 to 12 weeks from an approved sample. Because every sheet is set by hand, we send a real sample of your design and colors before production.

MaterialsMarble, onyx, brass and glass enamel
SheetsInterlocking, about 10 to 16 inches
UsesFloors, walls, bar fronts, feature panels
CustomAny design, any colors
Lead timeAbout 8 to 12 weeks; minimums may apply

How it is made

Every piece set by hand

The drawing. Every design starts as a full-size drawing. It decides where each line of metal will run and which material fills each space.
The walls. Thin strips of brass are bent by hand to follow each line, then set on edge to form small walled cells. In French these walls are cloisons, which gives the craft its name.
The fill. Each cell gets its own material: polished marble or onyx cut to fit, or a glass enamel laid in as a paste.
The fire. The enamel is fired until it melts into a smooth, glassy pool of color, sometimes in several layers for depth.
The polish. The whole sheet is ground and polished flat, so stone, enamel and brass meet in one level surface, with the brass drawing every line.

A short history

Three thousand years of the same idea

Cloisonné is one of the oldest decorative crafts there is. Jewelers on Cyprus and in Mycenaean Greece were setting glass into gold cells more than 3,000 years ago. Byzantine goldsmiths made it famous: from about the 9th century their enameled icons, crowns and book covers were prized across Europe.

The technique reached China by the 14th century and came into its own in the court workshops of the Ming dynasty. It flourished so brilliantly under the Jingtai Emperor in the 1450s that the Chinese still call cloisonné jingtailan, "Jingtai blue." Vases, incense burners and screens from those workshops are museum pieces today.

The modern step is scale. The same walled-cell method now builds mosaic sheets of marble, onyx, brass and enamel, made to be set on floors and walls: durable enough for a hotel lobby, fine enough to be the jewel of a powder room.