A nephew of a tile maker, three partners and a building on West Julian Street.

Fireclay Tile was founded in 1986 in San Jose, California. The fullest account of its start comes from its founder, Paul Burns, in a post on the company blog dated 18 January 2016. Burns wrote that in 1985 he left Stonelight Tile, a company his uncle had founded in a Berkeley basement in 1953, and that the following year he recruited three partners: Jeff Alvord, a college roommate who had studied bio-engineering, and Martin Zepeda and Albert Batista, both of whom had worked at Stonelight. The company’s own Our Story page today calls Burns its “Founder and Chief Ceramicist” and says he began as an apprentice to his uncle, continuing a family tradition that it dates to the 1920s.

The partners first looked at California’s Gold Country, where Burns wrote that there was good clay nearby and state economic-development money on offer. They settled instead on downtown San Jose, which was then a designated economic-development zone. In 1986 they found a building at West Julian Street through a broker, and Burns wrote that they were able to buy it in 1989. It suited them because it sat close to the freeways for Bay Area customers and was zoned industrial, so tile could be made there as well as sold.

English Wikipedia’s history of the company says that in 1987 Fireclay developed its own product line, called Colonia, made up of four-inch and six-inch square tiles with matching trim, and that in 1988 it began making its own glazes. In Burns’s telling, the San Jose site was never meant to be permanent. When construction of the arena now known as the SAP Center began in 1991, a city master plan proposed widening a neighbouring street, and the risk of being moved on led the company to set up a factory in Aromas, a small town in San Benito County. Wikipedia dates the Aromas manufacturing headquarters to 1992.

Kilns in the coastal hills, a city showroom and a second factory in Washington.

With production in Aromas, San Jose became a showroom. Burns wrote that he sold the San Jose property in 2009, during a financial downturn, and that the showroom doors closed in January 2016. His long-held goal, he wrote, had been a showroom in San Francisco’s design district, because interior designers from the South Bay tended to visit the city to see furniture, fabrics and tile in one trip. English Wikipedia, citing an SFGate report of April 2014, says the San Francisco showroom opened in January 2014.

The product range widened through the 1990s and 2000s. Wikipedia says the Vitrail line of tiles on a white body was launched in 1991 and a line called Debris followed in 1998. It also says that in 2010 Fireclay bought Sandhill Industries of Boise, Idaho, a glass-tile company, citing The Wall Street Journal, and that a glazed thin brick, made with the California brickmaker McNear Brick and Block, was launched in 2012. Local news site BenitoLink reported in July 2020 that the San Benito County Planning Commission had approved an expansion of the Aromas campus.

A major change in where the tile is made came in 2022. In a blog post dated 2 October 2022, Fireclay’s chief executive, Eric Edelson, announced that the company had the day before become the owner of Quarry Tile Company of Spokane, Washington, a tile maker he said was founded in 1965. He wrote that the two firms had already launched a joint range, the Essentials Collection, that June, and that the Aromas factory had been enlarged and given a second roller hearth kiln. Fireclay’s Our Story page now says its tile is made in its Aromas, California and Spokane, Washington factories, and its Our Team page lists Edelson as CEO.

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 maker that sells direct and shows colour first.

Fireclay’s identity is built around making and selling its own product. The company’s pages describe its tile as handcrafted to order, and it presents the Aromas factory as part of the brand rather than something kept out of view: its showroom list includes a factory showroom in Aromas, which it describes as a chance to buy handmade tile directly from the source, set among coastal hills. The rest of the showroom list follows the design trade. Alongside the San Francisco flagship, the company lists showrooms in Berkeley, Santa Monica, Costa Mesa, Palo Alto and Culver City in California, and further afield in New York’s Flatiron District, Portland’s Pearl District and Chicago’s River North design district.

Colour does much of the brand’s visual work. Fireclay’s website organises its ceramic, brick and glass tile around named glazes and shows them in sample grids and installation photographs, and the company offers custom glaze colours, handpainted tile and custom mosaics as separate services. Its own pages call the range “American-made,” and it names its factories in California and Washington. The company’s writing voice is direct and personal: Burns’s 2016 history and Edelson’s 2022 announcement are both signed first-person posts, and the Our Story page sets out values in short headings such as “Measure Twice. Cut Once.”

The founding story also gives the brand a lineage. Burns traced his own start to his uncle’s Stonelight Tile in Berkeley, and the company describes itself as rooted in California’s history of tile making. That line runs from a basement workshop in Berkeley to a downtown San Jose building and on to the kilns in Aromas and Spokane.

For a design guide, Fireclay Tile shows how a manufacturer can make the factory, the glaze and the founder’s voice into the brand itself. Compare Heath Ceramics, another California maker of tile and tableware, and Ann Sacks, the Portland tile house. For this guide we use glaze teal, fired clay, bisque and kiln charcoal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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