Click Up Your Heels on Tile Mile

You can look at one thing only so long before your mental compass starts to spin, so I wasn’t too surprised a few days ago when I started visualizing a huge explosion at a warehouse full of “I Love My Carpet” carpet freshener.

There was this bunch of guys in ninja outfits sneaking into the place at night, dropping down on ropes through a skylight while the “Mission: Impossible” theme played in the background. The bomb was in a box marked “ceramic tile.” They set the timer, shinnied up the rope and melted into the darkness, back to their lairs on Tile Mile. The explosion was tremendous, blowing lilac-scented powder all over the neighborhood.

An afternoon on Tile Mile can do that to you. You regress, back to the days before carpet, before welcome mats, before gunite, before Fiberglas. The entire world, you begin to believe, is made of tile and marble and masonry, or ought to be.

That’s certainly the opinion of the folks who run the warehouses and retail outlets on Tile Mile, the closest thing Orange County has to a remodeler’s Mecca. In their ideal world, your heels would click at every step and the vacuum cleaner would go the way of the snail darter.

Tile Mile sort of sneaks up on you. It lies on State College Boulevard in Anaheim, roughly between Katella Avenue and Ball Road, and there are nearly 50 warehouses, outlets and showrooms contained in that stretch and along a handful of tributary side streets. There’s no subtlety about a lot of the signage, either. In the great American tradition of “EAT!” one of the first words you’ll see driving north from Anaheim Stadium is “TILE.”

How Tile Mile became Tile Mile few people seem to know. There is no central repository of information on the place (the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce says that most of the tile folks don’t belong to that organization), but the people who run the show think of it as the tile world’s answer to the auto mall, with all its convenience, competition, variety and price warfare.

The recession is being felt there, said Bill Miller, the warehouse manager of Intile Designs, which has led to heightened price competition among some of the stores. Which, he said, often means lower prices for the customers. And, say others, the customers continue to come, often making a day of it, visiting as many of the stores as time allows.

Most of Tile Mile’s merchandise is just what you’d think: tile, in all its incarnations and price ranges, some of it European. The European designs, said Reiner Bachor, manager of Italgres California Inc., have particular appeal to Americans who have embraced the Continental preference for tile or marble instead of carpet.

Other stores, however, also sell many types of masonry and still others offer kitchen and bathroom fixtures in addition to the tile or stonework that surrounds them.

Villeroy & Boch, the newest kid on the block, is one of those. The 255-year-old German company opened its showroom and distribution center last month near the southern end of Tile Mile. One of the main differences between V&B; and many of the other stores on the mile is that the first thing your eye goes to when you walk in is not tile, but several examples of kitchen and bathroom suites, or “vignettes,” as they’re called at the store. These are all fully equipped combinations of sinks, fixtures, toilets, even bidets, each of which have been designed with a specific style and look in mind.

On the higher end of the price spectrum are such unique combos as a pair of bathroom suites designed by Paloma Picasso, but there are others in the mid- and lower-price ranges. And, of course, hundreds of examples of V&B; tile.

The Villeroy & Boch store also carries reminders of the company’s status as a maker of tableware. Throughout the showroom there are ceramic containers here, decorative jars there, complementing and accenting the displays of kitchen and bathroom plumbing. It’s a distinctly European-looking place, clean and high-tech, and its opening was enough to bring L.G. von Boch, the chairman of the company and the eighth generation of the tile-making family, out from Germany for the opening.

You needn’t match his exertion, but the best way to shop Tile Mile may be to walk it. Many of the stores and showrooms are butted up one against the other, and you’d probably kill your battery if you used the car every time you wanted to move 30 feet to switch parking lots. Once you’ve decided on tile, it’s easy to make a day of it and weekends, say the people who run the show, can bring heavy traffic.

Just don’t expect your feet to be comforted by anything soft to walk on. The folks on Tile Mile are committed to the hard surface. To them, carpet is just second-rate packing material.