Get Inspired: Mosaic Floors

A workman cleans a Roman-era mosaic floor recently uncovered in Lod, Israel. Image by Rina Castelnuovo for "The New York Times".

Several years ago I attended a close friend's wedding in Italy and for some ridiculous reason passed up the chance to spent a morning at Herculaneum, Pompeii's twin, a beautiful town preserved by the lava of Mount Vesuvius. I regret this decision—perhaps because of late I have been transfixed by mosaic floors, of which Herculaneum has many. Manufacturers such as Bisazza have done much to reinvigorate the genre but it is the mosaic floors of long ago, with their fanciful animals and exotic plant life—including an ancient floor recently uncovered in Lod, Israel, and reported on in The New York Times a few days ago—that should be inspiring designers today.

Roman- and Greek-style mosaics have a strength and vigor sorely lacking in today's often too-safe design world. I mean, if you are going to go to all the trouble and expense of installing miniscule bits of glazed tile, why not have them combined into something more impressive than a field of glistening white bordered with a simple black band? Shown below are some photographs of Villa Kerylos, an insanely beautiful mansion near Cap Ferrat, which was built in 1908 by Theodore Reinach, a French archaeologist of enormous refinement, and his fantastically rich wife, Evelyne "Fanny" Kahn. Like the waterside house itself, the mosaic floors are based on Athenian designs of the second-century AD, and each is a gem worth replicating, even if all you've got to improve is a powder room.