THE STORY OF OUR RECLAIMED BRICK AND TERRACOTTA

We started with a brick that we quickly discovered, due to its weight and unsuitability with modern underfloor heating systems, was neither desirable or profitable. This led us into the practice of slicing a brick to create a tile, now known quite widely as a “Lubelska Brick Tile”.

Many companies have now copied us but only a few have done so successfully and to the same high standards. Often we have helped them achieve this with advice.

We have now been reclaiming bricks and processing them into Lubelska brick floor tiles in Eastern Europe for nigh on seventeen years and we consider ourselves one of the foremost exponents in the practices of doing so.

The processes for creating this brick floor tile are quite simple. We take bricks from predominantly derelict farm buildings. They are jet washed and we take a slice from either both edges of faces depending on how we best think the brick should be dealt with.

Later we remove any lime mortar that remains attached to the brick. Sometimes they are mellowed by either vibrating machinery (tumbled through ceramic media) or further cleaned with wire brushes, always by hand either with manual brushes or electric hand-held tools.

We end up with a product that maintains its original character and patina and no two tiles look the same.

Whilst we were recovering bricks from demolished buildings, we noticed that the roof tiles were also going into landfill.

After a visit to one of our trade customers in the UK, we discovered that these too could be upcycled into beautiful flooring. We started with the warm terracotta roof tiles in Poland.

We discovered that simple jet-washing would not clean off the years of soot and dirt that had collected on these tiles from coal and wood fires. This led us to sand-blasting the tiles and then cutting them, removing the nib and developing 3 tiles that have become quite synonymous with terracotta flooring. Later we added the Hexagonal.