"Magnificent Mosaics"
Town & Country, July 2006

Designers and architects from Mustique to Montauk are adorning foyer floors, kitchen walls, bathrooms, fireplaces, furniture and garden walkways with mosaics created by Sara Baldwin (above). Her company, New Ravenna, based on Virginia's Eastern Shore, taps quarries in obscure corners of the globe for unisual marble and stone and create mosaics the way they've been made for centuries - by hand. "When you're working with natural materials and the human touch, every piece is unique," says Baldwin, whose clients include decorators Bunny Williams and Jamie Drake and architects Robert A.M. Stern and Adam D. Tihany.

Headquarters is a former shirt factory in the small town of Exmore, where Baldwin, a fine-arts painter by training, and her colleagues design and assemble mosaics. The final products are then shipped in small sections and can be reassembled by contractors, like jugsaw-puzzle-like, on-site. Any surface, pattern (from traditional basket weave to trendy paisley to a sophisticated allegorical tavleau) or size (Tihany ordered a 6,000-square-foot floor for Le Cirque in Mexico City) is possible.

Mosaics run from $50 to $1,000 per square foot and can be ordered through showrooms across the country. 757-442-3379, ext. 126; newravenna.com.