"Wat er op de vloer omme-gaet" All that goes on on a floor. (encaustic tiles)

Hello my friends,

The title of this post 'wat om die vloeren omme-gaet' refers to the title for an article written by Eloy Koldeweij. It can be found on the site of the Dutch national Library and a very interesting read. (‘Wat er op de vloer omme-gaet’: poppenhuisvloeren en de realiteit) 

Medieval encaustic tiles

It focusses on Dutch flooring materials and fashions from the middle ages into the nineteenth century. The emphasis lies on the question if the cabinet houses from the 17th and 18th centuries are reliable contemporary sources for the variety of floors and (simulated) materials that they have. A very interesting read indeed! I have used this article as a reference while choosing the types of flooring for Huis ter Swinnendael.

My first attempt at encaustic tiles

If you have read my blogpost on the start of the build I start with the east wing of the house. The cellar of this wing will house the Stewards office and the cooking kitchen. Both rooms will have tiled floors with clay floortiles. All the rooms on this floor of Huis ter Swinnendael will be tiled. Only the servants entrancehall will have white marble on the floor.

While the stewards office will get a floor in two tones, grey and red, the kitchen floor will only consists of grey tiles.  But which pattern will I use for the Stewards office? As you can see in the picture above I have narrowed the choice down to four types of arrangements. Feel free to give me your opinion. 

 I made the different tiles out of terracotta or grey coloured airdrying clay. I rolled out the clay between two spacers to get an even thickness and let it dry until the clay is leathery but not yet hardened to a point where you can't cut it. It is a tip I picked up in one of my books on miniatures. Cutting the airdrying clay when still soft does not give clean lines because the thin sheet of clay tend to cling to the knife and come up of the table when you lift up the knife.

When all tiles are ready I will place them on the floor arranged in the chosen pattern. When the pattern is made to fit, I glue them on the floor of the room. When all has dried I will grout them quickly with filler and clean the excess filler right away as to not damage the tiles.

The fireplace in the rentmeesterskamer (Stewards office) will get small glazed tiles on its floor. These tiles will have slipware decorations and are called encaustic tiles. By 1675, when the house was built, this type of tiles were no longer fashionable and therefore no longer made. So these are likely to be recycled from the previous house which was destroyed in 1672. Encaustic tiles are best known from floors in churches and grand house from the midle ages and grand houses.

Various designs of encaustic tiles

Truth is that I like the real ( medieval/ renaissance) slipware tiles/ encaustic tiles so much that I wanted to include some of them in Huis ter Swinnendael. But I remained hessitant. 

When I found the posts of Daydreamer in her Blog (http://aboutmydollhouses.blogspot.com/search/label/Encaustic%20tiles) I saw that encaustic tiles look great in miniature. I then knew that I simply had to make some myself. She has made over 1300!!! encaustic tiles for the floor of the Great Hall of her castle. I have made a much smaller amount of tiles. 

I may make more though. I will likely use some of them for the floor of the larder too. But the larder lies in the West wing and will have to wait for now. 

First I drew some decorations to scale after some original tiles on pictures I have sourced on the internet. It helped me to make a choice between the many possible decorations that were made through the centuries. 

The encaustic tiles are made out of airdrying clay in the same way as the other tiles. They are 1x1cm in size. For the decorations I used white paint. The original tiles would be decorated by pressing it into the clay and then filling the indentations with white clay, sometimes coloured with pigment. 

Finaly the tiles are glazed with a satin gloss glaze with some cadmium yellow mixed into it. This gives them a realistic yellow hue. You can see the difference this glaze makes. For this picture I glazed only a small part of them and placed them between the still unglazed tiles. As these are recycled tiles I do not make all matching decorations but a nice range of different decorations. And not every tile is decorated. I am very happy with the result. I will glaze all of them twice berore installing them. That will deepen the colours even more. 

By now I also have made most of the larger floortiles for the rest of the floor. But that is for a next post. I hope that you have enjoyed reading this one and till next time. 

Huibrecht