Tile, Cork, Lime and Clay: The Portuguese Materials Finding Their Way Into British Homes
Why do so many of the rooms we save this year look as though they were built somewhere warmer? We keep coming back to the same few things: a patterned tile behind the hob, a chalky wall that changes colour through the day, a floor the shade of a flowerpot. A lot of that look comes from Portugal, where builders have worked with tile, cork, lime and fired clay for centuries.
Azulejos, from church walls to kitchen splashbacks
Azulejos are the painted, glazed tiles that cover Portuguese churches, railway stations and apartment blocks. The name is usually traced to an Arabic word for a small polished stone, and the craft reached Portugal through Spain before Portuguese workshops made it their own. The blue and white panels most of us picture came later, when painters began covering whole rooms with scenes. The Museu Nacional do Azulejo in Lisbon, housed in a convent founded in 1509, holds tiles from the second half of the fifteenth century to the present day.
Keeping those panels on the walls of old churches and palaces costs money. Portugal’s golden visa no longer accepts property purchases, but one of its remaining routes is a donation of €250,000 to cultural projects approved by the government, and restoring national heritage is one of the causes it can fund.
In a British house we use them in smaller doses. A splashback, a cloakroom floor or the risers of a staircase gives the pattern room without turning the house into a chapel. Reproduction tiles are easy to find. Hand-painted ones from Portuguese workshops cost more, but they have the slight wobble in the glaze that makes the real thing look alive. If you are tempted by antique tiles, buy from a dealer who can tell you where they came from, because old Lisbon facades have lost a great many tiles to theft.
Cork, and why it no longer looks like 1974
Cork is the bark of the cork oak, which grows across the Alentejo in southern Portugal, the world’s largest cork producer. The bark is stripped by hand roughly every nine years and the tree is left standing to grow a new layer, which is why cork comes up so often in talk of lower-impact interiors.
The new versions look nothing like the orange cork tiles of a 1970s kitchen. We are seeing cork flooring in soft, pale tones, cork wall panels used to quieten home offices, and chunky cork stools and side tables that sit happily next to oak and linen. Cork is warm underfoot, quiet and slightly springy, which suits bedrooms and playrooms. It needs sealing in a kitchen or bathroom, and a dragged chair leg will mark it, so buy felt pads for the chairs at the same time.
Lime plaster and limewash
Drive through a village in the Alentejo and the houses are white, traditionally recoated with lime every year or two, often with a painted band of blue or ochre around the doors and windows. Some of those farmhouses now belong to British owners who have moved over for good (often on the D7 passive income visa), and the restorations that look best keep the lime walls instead of rendering over them in cement.
Lime gives a soft, matte finish that shifts with the light, and it is the look behind the limewash paints now sold in British shops. There is a practical case for it here too. Many older British houses have solid walls that were built to let moisture pass through. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings explains in its guide to lime that lime-based materials let old structures breathe and move, while cement and gypsum plaster can harm historic fabric. In a Victorian terrace or a country cottage, lime plaster suits the building as well as the mood board.
On newer plasterboard walls, a limewash-effect paint gives a similar chalky depth without the specialist trades. Expect the colour to vary across the wall; that variation is the point of it.
Terracotta underfoot
Portuguese farmhouses sit on floors of handmade terracotta tiles, laid in plain squares and worn smooth by generations of feet. The colour runs from pale apricot to deep rust, and no two tiles match exactly. We are seeing the same floors in British kitchens and garden rooms, often carried from the kitchen out onto a terrace so the two spaces read as one. If the tiles are going outside, check they are rated frost-resistant first, because a British winter will split the wrong ones.
Terracotta is porous, so it needs sealing, traditionally with linseed oil and wax, and it darkens over the years. Pair it with white walls and plain oak and keep the rest simple, because the floor already gives the room plenty to look at.
Why do they suit the way we live now?
After years of grey floors and white gloss, these four bring colour and texture into a room without much styling, and each of them changes with age.
The glaze crazes, the cork fades in the sun, the lime patches and the terracotta darkens. In the Portuguese houses where they have been left alone for a century, nobody seems in any hurry to put them right.
