Did someone say that anything good comes from France? Perhaps it was more along the lines of “anything authentically artistic.” That notion may be up for debate—and certainly the Italians might want to chime in on this—but lately I’ve seen the greatest number of design-related innovations from that humble burg with the distinctive Internet suffix, “.nl.” Yes, I do so love the Dutch. And I’m positively enamored of a certain Netherland trio’s creation that they call “DTile.” The company and the product share the name, a clever moniker that evokes this particular brand of tile’s spatial innovations while offering a smart pun on van der Rohe’s maxim, which might be re-cast here as “God is in the DTiles.”

DTile.

A Tile For Any Purpose, Any Surface

The hard facts on DTile begin with a new method of manufacture that facilitates rounded tiles of any radii, thus abolishing the familiar hard edges of tile surfaces, not to mention the coverage limitations that previously resulted in all those hard-to-clean junctions between tile and base board, tile and toilet, tile and basin, etc. With DTile, so say principals Peter van der Jagt, Erik Jan Kwakkel, and Arnout Visser, one eliminates the junction by keeping the surface smooth and continuous. This is possible courtesy of the innumerable DTile profiles that can variously negotiate the infinitude of curvatures and oscillations that constitute our human-made surfaces.

For me, the effect stands out most starkly in the faucet, sink, and drain portion of DTile’s demo kitchen, wherein the tile countertop elegantly drops down into a tile basin—no unsightly junction, no superfluous “finish,” no perpetual entry of water, grease, hair etc. into the now-absent crevice. As readers will no doubt observe, the product promises boundless leaps forward in hygiene, convenience, and clean-ability, but there’s more, so much more…

For brevity’s sake, here I defer to the explanations and aspirations of DTile’s founders, whose stated aspiration is none other than “tiling the world”: “we love tiles, and therefore we love the grid created by tiles… we love tiles so much that we do not want to interrupt that grid for any reason… not just bathrooms and kitchens, but also the façade of a building, a football pitch, an operating room, a market hall, or a living room.”

Intuiting, for the present, that any project to tile the Guggenheim or convert the living grass of Soldier Field to a slippery stone-cast panoply of hyper-real greens and whites might require at the least a quite extensive permitting process, the latest micro-innovations with DTile include integrated features such as shelves, towel hooks, pullout drawers, wall and ceiling vents, floor drains, blackboards, plant pots, even a mortar and pestle. These details are certainly sufficient to convince me of the product’s tremendous potential, and, as DTile’s present aspirations to tile woodstoves, buildings, market stalls, and even vehicles might suggest, they haven’t even begun to scratch (tile) the surface.

Via DesignBoom.