After lunch, the GF and I took a ferry to Uskudar – I will never grow tired of the ferry – and then a taxi about 10km inland to Ataşehir, a satellite town full of skyscrapers. I understand it’s a fairly desirable place to live, but felt rather grotesque, with huge glassy skyscrapers and massive flyovers, and little patches of carefully tended green dotted with pergolas between. A metastatised Mont Kiara in KL terms, perhaps, as I understand it’s beloved of expats and one needs a car to get around.
We were dropped off at the Google Maps location of a tile company, and there was nothing there, save for the shadow of a removed shop sign which however did not seem to say ’tiles’. We walked around the building a couple of times. It was the type of area where people feel very small, overwhelmed by tall, steel buildings, wind tunnels, and cars rushing past. Eventually we rang the tile shop and they said, we’re on our way! And so we waited for them to collect us. Google Maps had the wrong location, and they were well used to having to collect stray customers.
It was all very impressive. They make handmade encaustic tiles in a wide array of designs, and are clearly a fairly large operation that mostly deals with architects and design firms. The woman who showed us around, as the English speaker, mostly deals with their overseas clients, and there was clearly a substantial backroom operation, from the owner, a former stained glass artist who switched when she realised there was no market for it, and several designers, etc. We went through the designs, looked at samples of the ones we’d picked out from their website, looked at the colours they can do, and finally settled on a pattern and colours, though are still to decide how exactly those colours should be arranged in that pattern. They gave us pieces of a freshly baked cake, which was tasty and buttery, but rather surprising also as it didn’t have any sweetness to it.
We returned to Pera in fairly good time – a quick stop at the supermarket in one of those monstrous steel and glass buildings, a cab to Kadikoy and the ferry back. Unusually, we decided to stay inside the ferry this time as there was almost no one there, and we were both feeling a bit chilled after the wind tunnels of Atasehir. And so, back.
I have always loved encaustic tiles, I must say. Some old houses in Lahore, the pre-Partition ones, had that sort of flooring, usually in reds and yellows and oranges, and cracked all over. It is definitely an extravagance, though, at least today and perhaps also back then.
I am both pleased and annoyed, incidentally, that terrazzo is considered so stylish these days. Pleased because I have always loved what we called ‘chip floors’ and I’m glad it is not disappearing into memory – there was a long period when it was considered old-fashioned and unmodern and everyone was replacing their floors with wooden laminates or slippery ceramic tiles. And annoyed because now that it’s fashionable, it will soon become dated rather than simply unfashionable, while my fondness for it will remain.