Last summer, we were invited to our friend’s wonderful wedding in Poland. After that, we had a road trip to Austria, where we spent only a day and a night in Brno in Czech Republic, enrolee. The next morning we stopped at a local cafe for breakfast and there was an art exhibition on mosaic art. All the artists were wonderful, but we immediately fell in love with this jaguar piece!
The detail in the background, the shape, the movement of the jaguar and the way that it put wildlife (our passion) into something so artistic, really captivated us! As we were so fascinated by this masterpiece, we asked the cafe if the mosaics were for sale and they said we had to contact the artist directly, but unfortunately they didn't have any contact details. We were leaving Brno after breakfast so we took down the artist's name from the plaque above it and carried on our journey. After returning to Hong Kong, we kept thinking about this piece of art, so we did a google search of the artist's name. We still didn't get any results that we thought were relevant, so we tried searching social media. We found 4 people with the same name living in Brno, being determined, we sent a Facebook message to all of them.
1 month later, we had almost forgotten about it, but we received a message back from the artist who apologised for not seeing our enquiry earlier. His name was Ondra, a local amateur mosaic artist. His full time job is as an interior renovator, but likes to create mosaics as a past time and decided to create one to enter into this exhibition. Well, in the end, we were able to negotiate to buy it and Ondra helped us to send it to France, where it is now proudly displayed in our chalets in the French Alps. All this happened whilst we were negotiating the purchasing of La Torre and we were so inspired by this art, wanted to see how we could possibly incorporate something similar into our interior design.
We believe it would make a fantastic focal point in each of the guest rooms and common area. The mosaic is a very traditional decoration, especially in Italy, but with the touch of this artist, we can make it vibrant and modern as well. We explained our project to Ondra who also told us that he was looking for a large project to be able to quit his job and branch out into Mosaics full time. It could be a fantastic match and we further explored the possibilities together. Our biggest concern is working out how this will fit into the overall interior design and if such a mosaic would work well on the walls of the bathrooms or bedrooms. We have decided to go ahead with the mosaic theme for our agriturismo, yet the questions of how and where are still ongoing as we move further into the detail of the design.
Since, the mosaic has also formed the inspiration for our main logo and our wine label. You can read more about the development of the wine label here:
https://www.latorre.farm/post/how-we-created-our-first-wine
We can’t wait for you to see how we incorporate mosaic art at La Torre!
