Full-height hand-painted Delft tile backsplash running bench to ceiling around two windows in a Franklin Tennessee kitchen by Triple House Design

Real Spaces: A Delft Backsplash in Franklin, Where No Two Motifs Repeat

August 27, 2026

There is a test we run in the studio without ever having named it. When a finished wall comes back to us in photographs, we look at it three times, from three distances. A hand-painted backsplash has to earn all three, and most only manage one.

This kitchen in Franklin, Tennessee, by Katie Houston of Triple House Design, passes at all three — and the reason is something you cannot see until you are close enough to touch it.

One — from the doorway

Stand in the entry and the wall does not announce itself. It reads as one continuous field: pale blue on white, running from the benchtop to the ceiling, turning the corner beside the window and carrying on down the return.

That evenness comes from height. The tile does not stop at a tidy band above the bench. It goes all the way up, wraps the window reveals, and meets the ceiling line. Cut the same wall off under the cabinets and it would read as busy. Run it to the ceiling and it reads as calm.

The room helps. The benchtop is dark and unbroken, the cabinetry is a soft off-white, and the two rattan-shaded sconces sit in front of the tile rather than competing with it. Everything else is quiet, so the wall is allowed to be the one patterned thing.

Blue and white Delft tile backsplash behind a black soapstone apron sink, with brass and rattan wall sconces either side of the window

Two — from the bench

Move in to arm's length and the field resolves. Most of what is on this wall is Delft Corner Only: a tile with a small painted ornament in each corner and nothing in the middle. Laid up as a field, the four corners of four neighbouring tiles meet and close into a single small flourish, repeating across the whole wall. It is the oldest trick in Delft, and it gives you an all-over pattern without an all-over picture. There are a hundred and ninety-five of them here.

Set into that field are thirty-two painted motifs. Not thirty-two tiles — thirty-two different motifs. Every one appears exactly once.

An acorn. Three mushrooms, each drawn differently. Nine flowers, all named: pansy, daisy, lavender, geranium, hydrangea, cosmos, orchid, lily of the valley, and a bouquet garni. A bee, a butterfly, a ladybird. A shell, a leaf, a cherry, an artichoke. A book. A camp fire. A beach chair. A lamp post. Baguettes, butter, wine, champagne. A strawberry plant and a blackberry plant. A Christmas tree. A heart.

Read as a list it sounds like a lot. On the wall it is not, because the field around it stays quiet. You do not take them in at once. You find them over months, standing at the sink.

Close view of the hand-painted Delft tile field, showing corner flourishes and individual painted motifs scattered through it

Three — up close

Sixteen tiles on this wall were painted for the people who live behind it. Four are initials. Two are numbers — a year, and an age. And ten are portraits, painted from photographs, of the family's dogs.

They are not signposted. No dedicated panel, no framed feature, nothing announcing that this part is the personal part. They are scattered through the same field as the mushrooms and the baguettes, at the same size and in the same blue, so that a visitor reads the whole wall as pattern and the family reads it as an inventory of their own life. That is the restraint that makes it work. A commissioned wall that shouts about being commissioned is a trophy cabinet.

And then there is the hand itself. The blue is not the same blue twice. One flourish is fuller than its neighbour; a line finishes a fraction short; the glaze pools differently across two tiles laid side by side. Under morning light through those windows the wall goes almost lilac; by afternoon it has cooled back to grey-blue.

That blue is Bayswater, which we retired at the end of 2025 along with Borgo and Granger Red. Our blue now is Dutch Blue — a different colour, not a renamed one, and we wrote about why we changed at the time.

The designer put it more plainly than we would:

“These tiles made the whole room!”
— Katie Houston, Triple House Design

Delft corner tiles turning the window return beside wooden chopping boards and a blue and white bowl on a black benchtop

What is on this wall

Tile: hand-painted ceramic Delft, 108 × 108mm
Field: 195 × Delft Corner Only
Motifs: 32 painted motifs, no design repeated, plus 16 painted to order
Total: around 250 tiles
Colour: Bayswater, retired at the end of 2025
Coverage: bench to ceiling, returning around both window reveals

If you want to see the blue before you commit to a wall of it, order a sample first — colour on a screen is never colour on your wall. Our colour samples are free; you only pay shipping.

View across the Franklin kitchen island toward the Delft tile backsplash, sconces and soapstone sink