See the last 40 years of Ceramique Internationale!

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Dedicated follower of fashion - The Kinks

2014 marks our 40th anniversary! So to celebrate we have assembled a selection of 'fashion statements' to share from the past 4 decades of Ceramique Internationale.

Ceramique Internationale was founded May 24th, 1974

Cameron Fraser and Peter Vann have been personal friends since 1968 - just 16 years old here at a photo-booth in Leeds Railway Station when the companies founder, Robert Ibbitson was celebrating the start of his new tile business.

(Yes...leather hats were very fashionable for teenagers in the 70's!)

France was the first county we imported from, and these wine label tiles - designed by a student of the famous French artist Henri Matisse, served to inspire our gallic company name. 

This same supplier manufacturered a ceramic version of our logo which is on display in our showroom today!

Ceramique Internationale paves the way in London

We had been offering Saltillo and terracotta floor tiles to our customers 10 years before someone thought "Fired Earth" made a trendy floorcovering.

With our two new kilns we started adding value to plain tiles by firing wonderful floral decoration to match the best selling shell shaped bathroom suites!

170 Magnet Kitchen showrooms across the UK displayed and sold our tiles  - a youthful Jimmy Greaves (our former FD) chatted up the staff!

Punk rockers The Jam, were singing about "Going Underground"...so we did! Supplying the wall tiles in many of Londons tube stations. At the same time, a London postcard featured our Kings Road showroom, with the new parking deterrent for the yuppie generation!

Meadowhall needed our expertise!

The largest shopping centre in the country was built. Outside of London, Ceramique Internationale was the only company with the expertise to provide a technical solution that would look good forever!

Our third retail site - The Discount Tile Warehouse, opened in Bradford, and our kilns remained busy adding tatsteful 'Leaping Doplhin' decoration to plain tiles, especially for those customers who didn't like the 'Grecian Lady' ...nice!

Multicoloured slate became the must have kitchen/conservatory flooring and started the sale of natural stone floors for Ceramique Internationale.

Porsche, Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin and Lotus all under one roof and parked on our chic Italian polished porcelain. 

Leeds Railway Station showed off our Italian Porcelain

It was exepected that as their supplier, we lose to Topps Tiles at Golf... No problem for Cermique Internationale, as the Topps team included Paul Wey - a Ryder Cup player!

'Ceramics and Ideas' and our rebranded showroom The Tile Trader offered customers the chance to do something a bit different than the boring stone-a-like tiles that proliferated the boom years of property development.

Supply of these Italian porcelain tiles for Leeds Railway Station's new shopping precinct was a spooky throwback  - no sign of photo-booth though...

Over 120 combined years of service!

In 2014 it's getting hard to see the wood from the trees - with the amazing technology that enables tilesandmosaics.co.uk to offer the growing trend of amazingly realistic wood effect tiles to you.

You can see some of our biggest customers over the years above, we're sure you will recognise a couple!

Thanks for the last 40 years, your invaluable support has helped us to become what we are today. Here's to the next 40!

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