A Quonset hut, a wall-tile plant and a sister factory in Monterrey.

The brand now sold as Daltile began in Dallas, Texas, in 1947, under a longer name: the Dallas Ceramic Company. The company’s own history page says Robert M. Brittingham founded it “while operating out of a simple Quonset hut in Dallas.” The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on Dal-Tile International, names two Brittinghams at the start, Juan (Jack) Brittingham and Robert Brittingham Sr., and says the business set up its first wall-tile plant and its headquarters in Dallas. Both accounts agree on the year, the city and the family.

The family’s reach crossed the border early. Daltile’s history says that in 1955 Juan R. Brittingham formed Ceramica Regiomontana, S.A. to make ceramic tile in Monterrey, Mexico, for sale in Mexico and the United States, and the company directory history also dates a Mexican plant to 1955. The same year, the company says, it opened its first Sales Service Center, in Tampa, Florida. Those company-run sales centres, part warehouse and part showroom, became the way the tile reached contractors and builders across the country.

The modern name came in 1980, when, the company says, the Dallas Ceramic Company changed its name to Dal-Tile Corporation. That year it also bought Keystone Ridgeway, a maker of unglazed ceramic mosaic tiles, and in 1983 it acquired Edilgress USA, whose plant in Conroe, Texas, made eight-inch-square floor tile. The hyphenated corporate name, Dal-Tile, still appears in company records; the brand on boxes, catalogues and showrooms is written as one word, Daltile.

Investors, a merger with American Olean and a stock listing.

The ownership changed at the end of the 1980s. The International Directory of Company Histories says the investment firm AEA Investors bought the company in early 1990, when it was known as Dal-Tile Group. Five years later came the merger that shaped the modern business. In September 1995, the directory says, American Olean Tile Company, then owned by Armstrong World Industries, agreed to merge with Dal-Tile; the deal closed in December 1995, and Armstrong took a minority stake in the combined company.

American Olean brought a much older lineage. The directory traces it to the American Encaustic Tiling Company, incorporated in 1878, and to the Olean Tile Company of Olean, New York; American Olean Tile Company was formed as a joint venture in 1948, was bought by National Gypsum in 1958 and passed to Armstrong in 1988. Its plants in Fayette, Alabama; Lewisport, Kentucky; Olean, New York; and Jackson, Tennessee joined Dal-Tile’s factories in Texas and Mexico.

Dal-Tile became a public company in August 1996, with its shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the directory says. That year it opened a wall-tile plant in El Paso, Texas, acquired a floor-tile plant in Mount Gilead, North Carolina, and introduced a brand called Homesource. By the end of 1996 the directory lists plants in Monterrey; in Fayette, Alabama; Lewisport, Kentucky; Mount Gilead, North Carolina; Olean, New York; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Jackson, Tennessee; and in Coleman, Conroe, Dallas and El Paso, Texas.

The product range widened toward stone. Daltile’s history says it unveiled a Natural Stone Collection in 1999 and opened a Tile & Stone Gallery in Dallas that year, and that in 2000 it entered a joint venture with the Italian tile maker Emil Ceramica.

Design and documentation.

Tile makers and tile brands sit at many different points in the trade, from small studios where a design is pressed, glazed and fired by hand to large manufacturers whose surfaces are sold through showrooms, distributors and home-improvement stores. Some names make every piece themselves, some import what they sell, and some do a mixture of both under one label.

A tile brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a repeatable vocabulary: a family of glazes, a set of patterns, a way of edging or texturing the surface, and the catalogues and showrooms that present them. Because a name can outlast its founders, change owners or move its production, the questions behind each one are worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its tile is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its tile is made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Texas tile maker inside a Georgia flooring group.

In 2002, Daltile’s history says, Mohawk Industries acquired Dal-Tile Corporation. Mohawk, a flooring company based in Calhoun, Georgia, according to English Wikipedia, now lists Daltile and American Olean among its brands. Daltile’s history also records Mohawk’s investment in Sanfi Ceramics, a ceramic tile maker in China, in July 2010. Under the new owner the tile business kept building factories at home. The company says it opened a glazed porcelain plant in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 2003, and began producing tile at a new plant in Dickson, Tennessee, in 2016.

The catalogue kept moving outdoors and into new materials. Daltile says it launched an Exterior Collection in 2007, including Colorbody porcelain stone pavers; a Manufactured Stone Collection in 2009, along with partnerships with Microban and DuPont; and a new Natural Stone Collection in 2010. In 2013 Mohawk completed its purchase of the Italian Marazzi Group, maker of the Marazzi and Ragno brands, and the company says the integration of Marazzi’s United States operations into Dal-Tile was completed. A Daltile Design Studio opened in San Francisco in 2014, the company says, adding a design-trade showroom to the network of sales centres that began in Tampa in 1955.

On where the tile is made, the company’s wording is specific. Its about page says that “many of our collections are proudly designed, developed, and manufactured in the USA.” Its own history, meanwhile, records tile made in Monterrey from 1955, and the company directory listed the Monterrey plant among its factories in 1996, alongside plants in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas.

For a design guide, Daltile shows how a building-products company can carry a regional name for decades: a Dallas place-name fused with the material, written first with a hyphen and later as one word. Compare Walker Zanger, a stone and tile importer that grew from New York to Los Angeles, and Kohler, the Wisconsin bath maker. For this guide we use glaze blue, terracotta sand, grout grey and bisque with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Daltile’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.