The Tile Shop –

Tile For All Tastes And Budgets

By Kaaren Valenta

The most difficult part of buying tile is trying to imagine what it will look like once it is installed, especially when there are so many possible combinations of floor and wall tiles, borders, insets, mosiacs, and hand-painted accent tiles.

But customers have an advantage at The Tile Shop, located at 34 Church Hill Road. Lining both sides of the store, and in a double row down the center, are dozens of vignettes, each section showing what the tiles would look like installed.  

Rachel Salzman and her husband, Daniel Oprea, opened The Tile Shop in the storefront next to Starbucks in November to offer Newtown residents the same products and services that are available in their store on Main Street in Ridgefield.

“We’re happy to be in Newtown,” Mr Oprea said. “We’ve had a lot of positive responses from our customers.”

Because the stores are independently owned, they offer a selection of tile that customers aren’t likely to find in chain stores.

“We aren’t a franchise,” Ms Salzman said. “We deliberately left out all the tile that you can get everywhere else. We pick what we think customers in our area might want. And we don’t just sell tile, we provide design services at no charge.”

The stores offer custom design painted and fired tiles, murals and accents, and tile, marble, and other natural stone from around the world.

Rachel Salzman got involved in the tile business as an artist, hand-painting tiles. She worked with her artist father and her brother during the years when hand-painted tiles were the rage. It is a service she still offers – as evidenced by the painted tile landscapes and still lifes on the walls of the store – but now the natural look is gaining in popularity, using stone in various textures, shapes, and sizes.

“Natural stone is very popular,” Ms Salzman said. “Tumbled marble is becoming very popular, as is marble without polish to make it look old.”

Instead of hand-painted tiles, many customers are opting to use tiles that have different textures and raised relief patterns, some that portray fruit, vegetables, or animals, others that look like fossils. In the doorway of the Newtown store is a display that features tiles with raised bumble bees and others that look like honeycomb. The bumblebees can be painted, or not, as the customer prefers. While ceramic tile has been the mainstay of bathrooms and foyers for years, there are many other choices for use throughout the home.  Natural stone tiles, for example, come in three basic forms: polished, with a straight, hard edge; honed, matte-finish with crisp edges, and tumbled, a matte-finish tile with distressed, irregular edges. There are porcelain tiles, fired at high temperatures, that are more crack and chip resistant than ceramics, and that mimic the look of stone, at half the price.

The Tile Store also carries a large selection of handmade tiles and mosaics. A style that is thousands of years old, the mosiac is a classic way to use size and texture to achieve elegance. Grouped into patterns on a mesh backing, the tiles are easy to install despite their small size.

“Mosiacs are very popular. You can change the colors of the borders – they are very easy to customize,” Mr Oprea said.

Handmade tiles are the most expensive, he said, ranging mostly from $19.95 to $30 a square foot.

“But you can get the same look by combining a machine-made $6.95 [sq ft] tile with the more expensive borders,” he said. “That’s why we have the vignettes. We combine things – field [background] tiles from one company, decorative tiles from another, to make the look you want more affordable. Borders are terrific for updating less expensive tile.”

“We have tile that starts at $3 a square foot,” he said. “And we have a handmade tile that is $60, although most are in the range up to $30.”

A native of Romania, Daniel Oprea came to the United States as a political refugee 10 years ago and soon became involved with a tile business in Westport. He met Rachel, and seven years ago they started their Ridgefield store. The couple, who live in Bethel, have a seven-month-old daughter, Isabela, who divides her time with her parents between the two stores.

Mr Oprea is frequently out of the store, supervising his crew of installers. So when they opened the Newtown store, the couple hired Andrea Brewster to work in the store fulltime. Ms Brewster, who lives in Sandy Hook, worked for many years as an artist specializing in architectural renderings. She now uses her design skills to help customers plan the look they want in their homes.

“I love this job – I look forward to coming in each morning,” she said. “I really enjoy helping customers who are on a budget. I see how happy they are when we help them design a project that they can afford.”

The Tile Store is open Tuesday through Friday, from 9 am to 5 pm, and Saturday, from 10 am to 4 pm. Closed Sunday and Monday. The shop has a new Web site, www.tiletiletile.com, that is still under construction. For more information, call 270-9784.