Malibu Tile

Back in the 1950s, 12-year- old Lindell Lummer and a cousin used to scout the bottoms of Topanga and Mailbu canyons looking for old Model T Fords sacrificed over cliffs for movie scenes.

The young entrepreneurs had a market for the wrecks.

“We’d put three or four cars together and sell them,” Lummer said.

One day, on a back seat, Lummer found a box of colorful tiles made by the defunct Malibu Potteries, a nationally known tile design company that flourished throughout the Los Angeles region until a fire destroyed its factory in 1932.

Little did he know that this discovery would launch his career.

Lummer began to creat reproductions of the tiles he had found.

Today, he and his wife, Angelique Ferrari, own and operate Malibu Art Tile, which offers custom- made tiles to a mostly high -end clientele throughout Southern California and beyond.

Ferrari said she and Lummer, who is now 50, often reproduce Malibu Potteries’ designs, but that they also approach each new project with keen eyes and open minds.

“Our whole concept, at least mine, is there is nothing really new in art,” Ferrari said. “It might have a new twist to it perhaps, but it’s all there in history.”

She and Lummer, who is sometimes called the “Tile Maestro,” handcraft their tiles from start to finish, Ferrari said, with attention paid to special clays, colors, and glazes. She does most of the designing. He carves molds in which the tiles are cast.

Lummer maintains file photographs of early tiles from all over Los Angeles that he said total into the tens of thousands.

“They’re disappearing almost faster than I can take pictures of them.”