I always enjoy those moments in life when you find out something new that is actually interesting and/or relevant to your life.  I know I´m a sad case, but when that something new turns out to be a tile term, then my happiness knows no bounds.

Every year at Revestir, the Brazilian tile exhibition, there are always a handful of manufacturers showing ceramic tile screening tiles, around 40mm thick, with a variety of symetric or assymetric borders surrounding a void.

The idea is that these ceramic forms provide a degree of privacy, and/or sun shading, for exterior areas while still allowing the air to circulate freely.  They are proposed for novel design features such as outdoor kitchens, or for semi-private screening for external swimming pools or sun terraces.

They can also be a useful feature in open-plan interiors, either as a dado height dividing wall or as a floor-to-ceiling room divider that still allows adjacent areas to aurally and visually communicate.

Up until know, my only way to describe these sculptural ceramic pieces, which are quite complex in form if simple in concept, was ether a long-winded piece of text or a photograph.

And then today, I discovered that they have a group name: cobogó.

Of course,  my joy at this piece of knowledge was short-lived.  There is an obvious weakness, here.  If I have never come across this term having spent some 30+ years writing about the tile industry, I can hardly expect my readers to understand what I mean if I use it in an article, unless I provide a detailed footnote (which rather defeats the object).  So while I will, without question, find an excuse to include the term in a forthcoming edition of Tile & Stone Journal or Tile Today (or both), for now I am just sharing this precious gobbet of ephemeral tile knowledge with my fellow Tile Addicts.

I hope you will find a suitable opportunity to slip ´cobogó` into a meeting or dinner conversation. Your friends or work colleagues are bound to be suitably impressed!  Right!

A new post by Joe Simpson, Diary of a Tile Addict, March 2017.

Further coverage of the design trends at Cevisama, Revestir and Coverings 2017 can be found in Tile & Stone Journal May 2017, Pages 48-65, or online at www.tileandstonejournal.com.