About 20 steps past Jones’ work table, Sara McCaleb Baldwin, the founder and owner of New Ravenna Mosaics, huddles with her design staff. The group is scrutinizing a preliminary drawing for a large mural that a financial center in Dubai wants to install in its office. The potential purchaser’s interior design firm has supplied a rough sketch, and New Ravenna and two competitors, located in Italy and Canada respectively, are competing for the job. Cean Irminger, a nine-year New Ravenna employee, is creating the design, and she wants her colleagues’ input. Baldwin is happy to oblige. Big projects like this one are not as common as they were before the economic downturn, and so she and the designers want to win the contract. Playing the role of both editor and cheerleader at the small conclave, Baldwin makes concrete design suggestions that seem to energize the group.
Competing with Italian mosaic factories is just another surprising chapter in the unlikely story of New Ravenna, a company that produces a highly refined luxury product amid the easygoing environs of rural Northampton County. The 20-year-old firm is a few thousand miles and many centuries removed from its artistic antecedents in classical Greece and Rome. However, time and distance haven’t changed the nature of the business. Making mosaics remains a labor-intensive craft that often soars to the level of art—and when that happens consistently, orders follow. Today, New Ravenna mosaics are sold through nearly 200 independent design showrooms across the country, including nine in Virginia, plus a growing number outside North America.
The company’s client list is a who’s-who of top architects and interior designers, including Robert A.M. Stern, Bunny Williams and Jamie Drake, and, according to company officials, celebrities such as Tom Hanks, Madonna, John Travolta and Tommy Hilfiger have custom-designed New Ravenna mosaics in their homes. Baldwin, inclusive by nature, emphasizes that success has been a group effort. “Every custom piece represents the shared creativity of the designer, the client, the showroom and us,” she says. “We all have a hand in it.”
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