“But almost everything we do is made-to-order by hand in Virginia.” They order glass from the same company that supplied Louis Comfort Tiffany over 150 years ago. Stones are sourced from Italy, Turkey, Iran, Spain, or Brazil. Our attention to detail is immaculate, from the materials to the color variations,” says Irminger. “Our name became known for premiere mosaics. Soon, interior designers, celebrity clients, and commercial projects followed suit. The company also began manufacturing its own line of ready-to-ship tiles.īy 2000, home design magazines took notice. THE LEARNING FACTORY VIRGINIA INSTALLThe expanded space allowed them to tackle large-scale murals, add employees, and install waterjet machinery to cut tiles into intricate shapes. When New Ravenna outgrew Baldwin’s house, she moved into a strip mall storefront before taking over vacant buildings-including an art deco theater and former shirt factory-in Exmore. “So we figured New York, New Jersey- New Ravenna.” A champion of the Eastern Shore, Baldwin built the kind of company she’d want to work for herself, in the place she loved most. “We’re the new-world version of this old-world art form,” Irminger explains. She began hiring mosaicists to fill orders.Ĭasting about for a company name, she hit on Ravenna, the Italian city renowned for mosaic tile design. And while they’ve crafted samples for Taylor Swift and Keith Richards and shipped pallets from Exmore to Paris, Dallas, and Dubai, this business is local to the core.Įastern Shore native Sara Baldwin started the company at her kitchen table after admiring Roman mosaics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and wondering, Why isn’t anyone making these anymore? A year later, in 1992, her first collection of small borders and decorative tiles attracted interest at a trade show. Today she oversees a team of designers and artisans whose work appears in luxury hotels like Raffles in Singapore and the Mandarin Oriental in D.C.-and in the homes of clients Serena Williams, Tom Hanks, Madonna, and Ozzy Osbourne. “Then I was doodling on the community chalkboard in a local bar and one of the ladies there said, ‘You’re good. “I thought I’d apply to the public schools and become an art teacher,” she says. Irminger was determined to return to the Eastern Shore to find a job after graduating from James Madison University with a degree in studio art. She landed this plum hometown job because, as she says, “I’m a doodler.” They can’t believe this company is thriving in an old railroad town like Exmore, Virginia,” says Irminger, who grew up in nearby Marionville. “Most people expect us to be in New York or L.A. “Our processes and our look grew organically.”Ĭoveted around the world, New Ravenna’s mosaics are sold by high-end tile dealers like Ann Sacks and Waterworks, and they’re favored by interior designers like Bunny Williams, whose clients can afford to sheathe their walls with sophisticated bespoke tile murals the way the rest of us might hang wallpaper. “We were pioneers,” says Cean Irminger, New Ravenna’s creative director, of the company’s artistic style. Look carefully and you’ll see the curves, nuanced colors, and shading you’d find in a painting or a photograph. These are no ordinary tiny-square mosaics. Among them, 120 spend their days creating exquisite mosaic tile murals for New Ravenna, a company that sprawls through five buildings in Exmore’s sleepy downtown. At last count, the town of Exmore on the Eastern Shore had 1,348 residents.
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