By Mary Jo Padgett
Photos By Rimas Zailskas
Diane Rhoades had always used the four-place setting of French dinnerware whenever she wanted to celebrate or to enjoy a quiet moment with a friend over tea and biscuits. With its cheerful pattern, it had always seemed rather festive—elevating the everyday into a special occasion. It was sentimental too; a friend, who has a knack for spotting unique, quality dishware, had gifted the set to Diane.
"I really loved this set of dishes," Diane says. "I would think of my friend who gave them to me whenever I used them, and the color always brightened my day. I could dream of warm sunny days in beautiful Provence as I sipped my tea in the morning."
But tragedy struck. The handle of one of the cups was accidentally broken. Still, Diane could not bring herself to discard her treasured china and tucked the damaged cup and saucer away.
That is until Diane engaged Jay Reese to install some tile in her Hendersonville cottage.
As Reese was setting a backsplash of hand-cut ceramic tiles in a basket weave pattern in Diane’s kitchen, he had the idea to transform the "lost" cup and saucer by incorporating them into the design. The concept delighted Diane, an avid recycler.
"With miraculous precision, he split the cup in half," she says with a note of amazement in her voice. And since broken handles and chipped lips occur on well-loved cups and mugs more often than one would like, Dianes’s daughter Casey brought forth a favorite mug of hers that was chipped. This one, too, had been gifted—by a college friend who lives far away. Of course, that mug was halved and donated to the backsplash design.
Reese then created a three-dimensional mosaic, centered on the wall behind the stove, and framed it with recycled, creamy, antique marble pieces. "He’d never done such a mosaic before," says Diane, "but it worked."
The other half of her soft-yellow Provencal cup juts from the basket weave tiling at the edge of the backsplash near the window above the rustic wide-plank kitchen table. Two miniature German-made mice purchased at a local toy store now peer mischievously over the edge of the tilted cup.
Diane is delighted with her resurrected keepsake that, for a time, had seemed beyond usefulness. "Now look at it," she says, gleefully gesturing toward the cup’s new setting. "I still can enjoy a sweet moment each morning as I heat water for tea." For even though the sunny French teacup may no longer hold steaming Darjeeling, it’s still full of memories.
