Of Tile and the River

“I was a tile contractor, and then joined the army and ultimately deployed to Iraq. When I got back, life to me … well, my little portion of what I can do for this world is to spread the message of unity.” Reader, if you know any other contractors with this perspective, you are in a good place. 

Kerry Rice began Unity Tile and Design LLC in 2016. “It started in Aspen and Boulder, Colorado. I was a successful contractor out there but I began having a hard time with the cold, so I bought a house in Kauai, where I did a lot of mosaic work and lived for a couple years. At that time I was always going back and forth to Santa Barbara. I grew up in Lake Tahoe. I’m a California boy, and Santa Barbara just resonated with me.”

Kerry Rice is a veteran, a businessman, and an artist. As Unity Tile and Design’s title suggests, the spirit of the endeavor is colored by Kerry’s 10,000 foot take on All This. It would be easy to say he approaches his work with a “missionary zeal,” but that doesn’t quite convey what he’s about. His mosaic incentives are storytelling, and the stories are yours. If you can imagine it, Rice and his team can actualize it. Yes, he thinks of each completely custom project as an expression of life’s inherent positivity. As he states on his company website: “I enjoy showing my customers the difference art, like a mosaic mural, can make in their home. This is an energy-based company. I believe that my work creates happiness and spreads joy throughout homes and offices.” 

Lest we leave the impression that Kerry Rice is a sort of grout-covered Shaolin monk, wandering from job to job and radiating tranquil vibes…uh, he rarely has visible grout on his person. He doesn’t proselytize. It’s all in the work, and in the client’s vision.

“If someone asks me for something, I never want to say no. People who say no may be my pet peeve.”

In consultation with a home or business owner (you, that is), Rice creates bespoke visual splendor with mosaic – each project a singular statement of which there is only one in the world. You are its progenitor and proprietor. Taking a more quotidian stance, a custom mosaic – should it meet the criteria – can be valued as an original work of art in a home appraisal. But let’s get back to the numinous.

“Life is a mosaic,” Rice says. “I mean, we can describe it however we want, but when you look at life – this picture we have of the world – it’s really comprised of little fragments of energy. Mosaic does the same thing. When you assemble these beautiful little pieces – when you design something or you create something – that finished work is, in its way, the story of life.”

Wandering ≠ Lost

Rice’s personal backstory frames his outlook and veneration of art. His time in the army lies astride – and neatly divides – the road-forking outlook that changed the work and the man. A busy tile contractor at the time he went into the service, Rice’s enlistment and the gauntlet that followed changed him. His time in Iraq included working at a forward operating base and keenly watching for enemy activity. Rice also served on a quick reaction team that responded instantly to incoming emergencies of every kind. No need to unpack those chapters.

“When I got out…” he says, then briefly pivots. “I love tile. I’ve loved tile since I was very young. But when I got back from the army, back from Iraq, my mind… plateaued. It was just not focusing on doing your everyday sort of tile setting. I began studying dance and art and that was really healing. I got restless and began traveling. I went to Europe, I went to Spain and Italy and France and Mexico…” In fact, Rice studied mosaic in Spain and Moroccan tile artistry in Marrakesh. “I was in Spain and actually doing some contemporary dance classes while studying the architecture there, and Gaudí’s work – the chipping and forming of all that mosaic, all the time and exactness that took. I was in awe.” 

Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí – perhaps best known for his monumentally strange work-in-progress (142 years and counting) Sagrada Família in Barcelona – extravagantly introduced an un-patterned, free-flowing aesthetic to mosaic, an expressionist freedom Rice took to heart. Meanwhile, the young man’s sojourns and wanderings and learnings were changing him, drawing a scrim across his past and colorizing his future.

“I had plateaued, but I pushed through that barrier when I began studying and truly understanding art, mosaic, and its possibilities. I mean, the first mosaic ever discovered dates back to the third millennium BC. It was clearly all about their understanding and capturing the moment in art.” 

That is, following his honorable discharge from the military, Rice’s creative and professional energies momentarily ground to a halt. He put down his tools and reframed. When his creative engine sprang back to life, it ran on a rich new fuel mixture. “The picture that formed of mosaic work, it completely captured me. I began to understand that was the answer.” 

Emotional Tile Setting

Rice waxes rhapsodic about the very personal, boutique nature of the mosaic work for which he is commissioned, but his lustrous tile and stonework have likewise long earned him a mob of grateful clients. In Boulder, his immersion in the ancient tile artistry he’d absorbed in Marrakesh made his reputation. His work at the foot of the Rockies appears in restaurants, businesses, residences. A sampling of his clients’ 5-star enthusiasm can be found on his website.

Talking to Kerry Rice is itself an experience. His mellow effervescence and “glass-half-full-to-overflowing” alacrity – it is good. He has no choice but to silently bear these gifts onto the jobsite, sometimes with emotionally rewarding results.

“The mosaic waterfall that I did in Kauai for this couple, he was a veteran and his wife turned 75 and he surprised her with this work; their entire front patio a beautiful Hawaiian waterfall. And we all just…wept! Yeah, they’re just amazing people.”

Kerry Rice, a once-roaming, recent arrival to our shores from Boulder (by way of Kauai), is – dare we suggest – home. And already busily colorizing the village. “My biggest thing is to share love and unity and to grow in my understanding that life is a mosaic. And that’s my biggest goal – to create the connection of unity within people and to share a story.”  

Visit unitytiledesign.com.co or call (805) 951-0226