Faye Toogood Turns Tiles Into Body Parts for Mutina Debut

Faye Toogood turned down every tile company that came calling, waiting for one specific manufacturer. "But I turned them down in the hope that maybe one day I would get a call from Mutina," the British designer said earlier this week. That call arrived, and the result is 'Faces & Figures' — Toogood's debut tile collection, now unveiled at Mutina's headquarters in Fiorano Modenese, Italy.

The collection pairs plain geometric tiles with boldly figurative ones. Sculptural eyes, ears, mouths, noses and nipples protrude from ceramic surfaces, animating walls that traditionally stay flat. Toogood describes the project as an attempt to solve a single manufacturing problem: "How can I challenge the industrial nature of Mutina to create something that felt like it had been touched by the hand?"

Mutina operates at the heart of Italy's ceramic tile production district, and the company has built its reputation by pairing industrial manufacturing with high-profile creative collaborators. Patricia Urquiola, Barber Osgerby and Nathalie Du Pasquier have all reinterpreted the tile for the brand, both functionally and creatively. Toogood now joins that roster.

The project began in Toogood's London studio, where she modelled with clay, cardboard, paper and canvas — her standard palette of prototyping materials. Hand-prototyping is a documented constant across her practice; every project starts with a physical act of making before developing into a finished product. Surprisingly, 'Faces & Figures' marks the first time she has worked with tiles at all.

The final range works as a complete toolkit for designing a space. It includes three sizes of plain geometric tiles in four colours — chalk, sand, clay and mud — each available in glossy and matt finishes. Two matching organic forms come in a brushed matte clay effect, and a series of extruded bricks rounds out the collection. Bricks are a Mutina staple; the company has repeatedly reinvented the format.

Every tile in the range emerges from Mutina's industrial process, yet each appears handmade, as if it came straight from the designer's studio. The human body drove Toogood's exploration from the start. The anthropomorphous elements — the eyes, noses, nipples — insert themselves into patterns alongside the neutral geometric pieces, and the collection is designed for mixing and matching in both traditional and unexpected arrangements.

Toogood attributes her willingness to break format conventions to her unusual career path. A former magazine editor, she moved into design without formal training. "Maybe the fact that I didn't study design means that I'm able to open a door without even realising I'm breaking a boundary, because I haven't had those boundaries and lines created for me," she notes.

Her body-centred approach shaped every decision. "When I think about a chair, I think about how the body connects to the chair, when I make a table, I think of how the legs sit underneath the table. It's all about how the body connects to furniture and objects," Toogood explains. "And I wanted to do very much the same with a surface, so it couldn't be only geometric. I wanted it to feel like it had actually had a human touch."

Early in the process, Toogood posed the central question: "Could we create, on an industrial scale, something that generally felt like it just came out of my studio?" The finished collection answers yes, and she makes the personal stakes explicit: "There couldn't more of me in this collection."

The achievement lies in the balance: a range warm and idiosyncratic enough to carry the designer's hand, yet replicable at industrial scale for practical architectural use. With 'Faces & Figures', Toogood extends Mutina's long-running experiment — giving its production lines over to designers willing to treat the tile as sculpture rather than surface.