ROY MARCUS, BRAND AMBASSADOR:
Can you speak about what prompted the NJ renovation?
NANCY EPSTEIN, FOUNDER & CHAIR: I had to renovate the bathrooms in my Tenafly home because they were leaking. I had no choice. The timing was great. Even though they were close to 30 years old, if not more, it was time - we couldn’t use the water in them at all.
ROY: At the time that you designed it, it was a really satisfying design for you - was it hard for you to say goodbye to something that you really loved, or were you just really ready to have something new?
NANCY: I never really wanted to renovate the bathroom at the top of my steps, because it had gone through so many eras and it never went out of style. It was an amazing space and I just loved it the way it looked! The other bathroom? I never liked the vanity, I wasn’t so happy with it. I am kind of glad it leaked - it was time!
ROY: Let's talk about the new green bathroom - that bathroom is just this fascinating interplay of vivid, natural stone and one of our most signature, brilliantly colored Artistic Tile materials.
ROY: How did you go about composing a space with two very lively, very different materials?
NANCY: One thing about me - I am not a neutral person - not in my personality, not in my choices of materials. Everybody laughs at me because I’m always "blue blue blue blue blue," so I had to go to another color for this bathroom and one of my very favorite patterns in the world that we ever developed is the ombré. I love the green ombré! In fact, I’m a little afraid I’m turning into a green person! I’m gonna be "green, green green green green," but we’ll see what happens when we build my home in Florida. The White Jade is a gorgeous stone. The ombré is spectacular, so instead of blue, (I am quite blued out), we are very very green, and as Kermit the Frog used to say it isn’t easy being Green.
Teju Primal Ivory
Calacatta Gold Slab
Doge White
Design Mastery
Artistic Tile Founder & Chair Nancy Epstein
Brings Her Passion for Extraordinary Materials to her NJ Home
:
ROY: The Breccia Capraia bathroom, when I first saw it,
I thought ‘this is like a modernist riff on Nancy’s own bathroom’. There are shapes, there is color, your ideas in that bathroom - I feel it’s almost like a jazz version of a symphony, that there’s a relationship between these two spaces. I want to talk about the comparison between conceiving these two brecciated marble bathrooms, done over a period of 20 years.
ancy Epstein’s passion for natural stone & the art of antiquity has inspired generations of architects and designers. Her deep love of natural materials is lavishly evident in the home she has created for herself and her family in Bergen County,
New Jersey. Nancy often describes this place as “a couple of miles - and a world - away from New York City.” It is a richly personal refuge from the frequent travel and frenetic pace of an industry leader’s life, and is filled with uniquely conceived spaces graced with marvelous stone and tile. Over twenty years ago, Nancy’s own primary bathroom became renowned as a stunning evocation of her exuberant style and collector’s eye, paved with Breccia Imperiale, a stone that has lured designers and artisans for millennia. The 2020s saw Nancy add to her living room a tequila bar that glows with Botanic Green quartzite, and a sofa with sumptuous velvet cushions backed by a one-of-a-kind frame of brass and brecciated marble. Outdoors, her poolside entertaining spaces were reconceived, with radiant mosaics from Artistic Tile’s Jazz Glass collections and a magnificent blue quartzite pergola floor.
Recently, Nancy relocated her domicile to a new luxury highrise in the Miami area and set out to remake the space, eschewing the faux-marble porcelain used throughout by the building’s architects. Her absence from her NJ home also presented an opportunity to renovate spaces there, and she set about the renewal of its three guest bathrooms. We sat down with Nancy in her apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay to learn more about how she approaches designing with her tile and stone in her
own personal space.
Arabescato D'oro
THE ARTISTIC DIGEST
Tailored To Domino:
A Conversation with Nancy Epstein
White Jade Slab
Thin Herringbone Thassos
Billie Ombré Green
Glass Mosaic
N
Cipollino
White Sand
ROY: I want to talk about the other bathroom, in the basement. It’s not as lavish as the other ones. It uses a simple ceramic
but a very stylish one, the cream colored Teju Primal. The way that you mix all of the materials together, let’s talk a little bit
about the power of beautifully combined neutrals, when you do it.
NANCY: My basement bathroom is a really never-used bathroom, on the way to the gym. There used to be a bedroom connected to it, but when that bedroom became a wine cellar, we had started to renovate the bathroom. We ripped out and replaced the wall, but then for 20-some years I was living with a halfway tiled wall. For the update, I decided to go with the Teju pattern. When my husband and I first moved to New Jersey, we had a ceramic tile that was like skin. It was replaced generations ago, but I had always loved that skin look! We were able to reproduce it again on ceramic tile and this time with the texture, it really feels dimensional. It's not the typical, bold Nancy Epstein, but the tile spoke to me because of the beauty and the pattern. Adding the Doge on the floor is just so much fun. We have the Thassos herringbone on the ceiling, which makes a room with a very, very low ceiling, look a lot bigger and more open.
ROY: Speaking for aficianados of brilliant design, the way in which you created three such fascinating spaces, related to each other
by richness of material and intelligence of layout, is like a master class on bath design. Nancy, thanks for giving us a glimpse of the inspiration, the process and the marvelous results!
Lilac
Calacatta Rosa
NANCY: I am a lover of brecciated marbles. To me, they speak of antiquity, they speak of how the world already was in the Roman era, the Greek era. Brecciated stones just speak of history, architecture, and archaeology to me. I love them! In my master bathroom, done about 20 years ago, we put in Breccia Imperiale. The favorite stone today of all of the Epstein family is Breccia Capraia, in all of my sons’ homes. It’s my son Zachary’s master bath. It’s my son Michael’s powder room. It’s my son Joshua’s dining room table. It’s a stone that we love and adore, and I wanted to make sure that my life was filled with Capraia. I tried very hard to find a different stone to use in that bathroom, but I kept coming back to Capraia, and even though we were having a Covid-related inventory situation, I held out and we were able to do it.
ROY: Can you speak a little about the Domino pattern on that floor? It uses five different colors of beautiful, but different kinds of natural stone. It's not especially 'riotous' in terms of dark and light, but beautifully divergent, making a very rich floor.
NANCY: My son Zachary’s contribution to the bathroom was the bathroom floor. He really wanted me to use this (Domino) pattern because it’s one of his favorites. We wanted to show all different stones put together, forming a pattern, in which each stone, separately, may not work with each other but together and in this sort of stepped pattern, it works beautifully!
Breccia Capraia Slab
3/4" Honed Stone
Gloss Ceramic Straight Edge
Stone Triangle Mosaic
ROY: Talk to us a little bit about the importance of tiling a
ceiling.
NANCY: The ceilings are tiled, number one because of humidity
in the bathroom, and two, because it makes such a visual impact on the space. You actually see the hallway bath ceiling from the hallway because there’s a large window in it. In the other bathroom there’s a large skylight and we all know skylights tend to leak, especially when yours is over 40 years old like mine, so we tiled the ceiling. Besides the protection for the moisture,
it is also to protect us if that skylight leaks.
3/4" Polished Stone
Polished Stone Mosaic