Once Upon a Tile

In Coral Bourgeois's Providence home, art is displayed where you least expect it.

(Photograph by Aaron Usher III) Coral Bourgeois first experimented with tile in her own home. Now her tiles decorate interiors everywhere from Palm Beach to Dubai, and locally at the Liberty Hotel in Beacon Hill.

It's not often you see kitchen or bath tiles hanging on the walls of art museums, but after seeing Coral Bourgeois's little works of art, one wonders: Why not? Using circles, ovals, and rectangles of medium-density fiberboard, or MDF, as her canvas, she hand-paints each one with images both fanciful and serious, from Moorish motifs to world leaders to African animals, and often sprinkles them with colorful gems and beads. "What makes my tiles different," she explains, "is all the stuff I put on them."

Bourgeois, 54, lives in Providence with her husband, two cats, and two teenagers. She started her career drawing and painting, then launched a jewelry line. "In my earlier artwork, I used to lay out folded paper on a tile floor and do a rubbing of that, and then I'd paint over it and color it," she says. "I had some tiles sitting around one day. I thought, `What if I paint on wooden tiles and put resin on top?'" (She makes the MDF tiles look like shiny ceramic by adding multiple layers of epoxy resin.)

These days, Bourgeois is shipping her tiles everywhere from Palm Beach to Dubai to embellish private homes, restaurants, hotels, and casinos. Last year, she covered a New York City diner at 14th and Sixth Avenue with 19 two-foot by three-foot tiles and 69 one-foot square tiles depicting food and drink. Many of the larger tiles she created included relief designs and jewels; she says she was especially pleased with one that featured a 3-D fried egg. Closer to home, Bourgeois created a 19-foot tiled mural in the Liberty Hotel in Boston, and in the hotel's bar, Alibi, which relays a story of strife, replete with mug shots, handcuffs, and fingerprints.

She may have had the most fun, however, in her own quirky, historic town house. The narrow rooms showcase her obsession, with tiles twinkling back from walls, cabinets, and countertops. No surface is left unadorned. Even a collection of musical instruments have been "Coral-ized," including conga drums, a banjo, and an acoustic guitar (a gift for her husband). The newest addition, a chest of drawers on which she collaborated with her son, showcases a melange of pop-music images, from the Beatles to Arlo Guthrie. Now that it's complete, the family stores their assorted "music junk" in there. (Her husband, Scott Stenhouse, and son, Miles, are musicians, and her daughter, Ruby, is a dancer.)

Bourgeois's first major installation was in the kitchen, which she tackled 13 years ago. "We had been in Providence for three years," she recalls. "I had just left the jewelry business, and we moved into the house two days before Ruby was born. It reflects the colors and patterns I was into at the time." The counters and backsplash are covered with multicolored ceramic tiles, hand-painted with Moorish- and Persian-inspired designs, which are interspersed with black-and-white geometric-patterned tiles. The effect is dizzying and spectacular.

Tucked around the corner is her next masterpiece - the risers on the stairs leading to the second floor, a project that mixes tiles featuring birds and deer with ones decorated with zebra prints and black-and-white geometric shapes. There's also the powder room off of the kitchen, decked out from floor to ceiling with subtle psychedelic designs created to match the bejeweled floral tiles she used for the border, which is made from tiles left over from a commission to decorate 300 bathrooms in the Loews Hotel in New Orleans. (She also did the major entrance piece there as well.)

Since she's running out of things to cover at home, Bourgeois is formulating bigger plans for her tiles. "I would love to do a whole room - floors, ceilings, walls," she says. "Just give me one room in the Whitney."

Marni Elyse Katz has a bathroom covered in turquoise glass tiles in her Truro home. Send comments to designing@globe.com.