The Story
So having just moved to Barcelona we were out taking an evening stroll pushing our 1 year old daughter in a stroller. Suddenly my wife Benedicte, who is the creative force behind Mesa Bonita, is doing what she does best… dumpster diving. She surfaces with an arm full of absolutely stunning antique floor tiles (baldosas). With a little more inspection we can see that pretty much an entire floor has been torn out of one the adjacent modernista buildings. Within moments I’m carrying the kid and the stroller is full of baldosas and we are making the first of what will be many, many trips from the dumpster to our apartment which sadly is on the third floor of one of those formerly mentioned, elevator free, Modernista buildings.
Over the next years Benedicte would discover “treasure” after “treasure” amidst the construction debris and as our closets, balcony and tiny terrace filled up with stacks and stacks of Benedicte’s discoveries we knew we had to do something. Making these tables is that something.
The Baldosas
Barcelona has always grown in spurts. The Romans. The Moors. OK they took a break during the dark ages. The industrial revolution. The olympics. In the later part of the last century Barcelona knocked down the old Medieval walls and added the Eixample. The Eixample was the dream and playground of the Modernistas; architects, artists and craftsmen who were really trying to reinvent society from the ground up. Influenced by the tangibility of nature and the intangibility of God the most famous of all the Modernistas was architect Antoni Gaudi whose still uncompleted Sagrada Familia Cathedral really set the bar for insane fever dreams turned real by human will, passion and devotion. Around this time the Catalans, having a well earned reputation for being, how do we say this… frugal… developed many techniques for doing things efficiently. The beautiful seemingly hand carved base relief textures on many of the buildings in the Eixample are in reality the fruits of a process that could be applied quickly and relatively inexpensively. And so it is with these baldosas. Developed in the south of France in 1875 and using a process where a mixture of pigments, and ground marble are applied hydraulically to a substrate of mortar these baldosas were chosen to grace everything from the finest homes in Europe to the graceful mansions of Cuba and the Ivory Coast, the palaces of the Czars and the official building of Berlin. They were on the cutting edge of fashion and remained so until the 1950s when “gasp” linoleom became popular. Because the system was infinitely flexible literally hundreds of patterns were produced.
The Tables
Phase 1: Tile acquisition.
As we go about our day, dropping our now 7 year old off at school, going to the mercado or more accurately to the supermercado, the post office, the pharmacy, the hardware store, etc., we keep an ever watchful eye out for… dumpsters. Upon locating one with baldosas Benedicte immediately returns for the “transportation device”, which is an incredibly expensive Bugaboo baby stroller that somebody handily left by one of the said dumpsters. We are still hoping that it was indeed abandoned and not just left temporarily outside of a store or a restaurant. The stroller can hold up to 24 floor baldosas depending how much mortar is still attached to the bottom. You’ll hear all about the pesky mortar in just a moment.
Seeing Benedicte bent over the dumpster usually causes one of the trabajadores who are involved in sucking the life and history out of these buildings to stop, light up a cigarette and chat her up. Hip to that fact that a friendly conversation with one these chicos can lead to more baldosas and valuable tips regarding the location of other floors that are about to be ripped out Benedicte listens intently and tries to bat her eyes as little as possible. Over the course of time Benedicte has become really good friends with many of these guys. I ask no questions as long as baldosas continue to appear.
So once the tile have made the trip from the dumpster to our casa, which can take any where from 10 minutes to an hour the fun begins. I should add that as many as 10 trips are required to harvest a good dumpster. We have moved since our original 3rd floor walkup and sadly we have not acquired the services of an elevator but we have lost 1 floor and gained a pretty big terrace and a work shed. The baldosas are then sorted and delicately piled up around the edges of the terrace so we have at least a place to eat lunch and grow a few plants.
Phase 2: El Construction
Remember that mortar I told you about? Well it can be up to a couple inches thick and it all has to come off. Problem 1. What is the bottom layer of the baldosas is made out of? Mortar. What do they apply to the baldosas to get them to stick to the sub-flooring? Mortar. Physics tell us that 2 like objects that are inherently adhesive in nature and that have been stuck to each other by this very same property will be difficult if not impossible to separate. Trini at the nearby drogueria (paint and noxious chemical store) says that it is traditional to use red wine vinegar to separate these layers. Spain would have collapsed just after Felipe and Isabella retired if it were not for red wine vinegar. They use it for everything here. Floor cleaner. Works great! Breath freshener. Works great! Preventative delousing agent! Yep! Anti-spermacide… well Spain has the lowest birth rate in Europe. Salad dressing. Are they nuts?! Miraculous sub-molecular layer separator? Forget about it. The only way to get that stuff off is to 1st use a hammer and a chisel and then a grinder. So hammer and grind we do… let me be honest hammer and grind she does. I have an allergy to standing under the broiling Spanish sun banging on rocks for up to 8 hours at a stretch. So once the baldosas are all clean and tidy then what?
The sad story of the lost art of blacksmithing: Making the table base.
One skill that neither Benedicte or I possess is metallurgy. So we thought that in the land of manly men like Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem which has things for manly men like iron wine glasses and toothbrushes that there would be lots and lots of portly, sweating hombres dressed in leather aprons hovering over red hot embers who could whup you up anything from a basketball to a to a TV remote from heavy gauge iron. Well like many assumptions in life this is not the case. Early tests featured welds that my dog could have done better. Dimensions were a moving target. Too big. Too small. One leg shorter than the other. It was amazingly frustrating and it took forever. Finally while pushing the stroller back from a well laden dumpster Benedicte saw a metal working shop. And way in the back of that shop was really big sweet man named Jaume. She handed him the plans and a whack of cash and fully expected to have another iron sculpture for the jardin. A week later she received something close to what had been designed. So we now had our artisan in iron lined up and ready to get sweaty.
Our market research has indicated to us that many people now actually want things that are rusty. Now it’s called patina… which if you look it up is actually rust in Italian. What ever happened to the fear of corrosion. When I was a kid it was right up there with the communist threat. Remember “Rust never sleeps”, no not the Neil Young song, the slogan for Rustoleum. So just how do we get these suckers to “patina?” Trini at the drogueria again suggested vinegar… so we asked Jaume and after he said that we should pick up a few tomatoes and some lettuce to go with Trini’s suggestion told us about some other stuff that in addition making metal “oxidize” will easily take the skin off your forearms or forehead if you get too carried away. He also added that it was good for plants… Ah España. Anyway we apply the stuff, wait for a month and then treat it with a product which like rustoleum stops the corrosion from eating the legs right off the table. We tried glossy varnish on an early one but it looked like it was supposed to be in a swanky bordello or Javier Bardem´s house. So now like Henry Ford, you can have any finish you want as long as it’s matt.
El finale grande
OK since Benedicte finds and grinds the baldosas and Jaume hammers molten metal into bases what do I do? Well I’m kind of an idea man… you know the visionary type. Strategies, target markets, maybe a little copy writing when I am inspired. And I have a bad back. You know like Jack Kennedy. Well the firm had different plans for me. I was to become the Grout and Mortar Meister. Luckily I had done a bit of this in my youth. I was actually good enough that somebody once said I should reconsider my aspirations to make films to be a tile layer and dry wall guy. In retrospect maybe they were right.
Anyway I lay the baldosas and do the grouting. I kind of love it. Big chunks of heavy stuff floating on a sea of mortero. Tapping the baldosas with a rubber hammer. And then when it dries the real magic begins. The grouting. I trowel the stuff in and let it start to set… then I get nervous and begin to imagine that the black goo that is caking up on top of the baldosas will stay that way. The very same baldosas that Benedicte has sold her body to various palettas through out Barcelona for. The very same baldosas that she has wheeled back to the piso in a stolen baby buggy and then without even showering has ground 3 inches of 100 year old mortar off of just so I can cover them with various shades of cement and toss the mess into a dumpster not unlike the ones from which they came. I take a deep breath and start using my “float” (which is basically a sponge on a board) wiping up the excess, not too much or it leaves an indentation which has to be filled up again and imagine the whole thing being destroyed… Then I use a sponge. Then I use a rag. Then my finger. Then my tongue… Eventually in a fairly short amount of time it’s done and boy… does it look nice. And folks how we can sell them to you for 19 bucks shipping included is beyond me.