10 wackiest backsplashes you'll ever see

Chalkboard

Many food writers have intriguing kitchens because the rooms often are like home offices. Dana McMahan, a restaurant reviewer for the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper, sought a dash of Europe for her space.

"I love the blackboard menus at bistros in Paris and like to add little touches to my home to remind me of my favorite place in the world," McMahan says.

That inspired McMahan and her husband to buy a bucket of roll-on blackboard paint, tape off the wall behind their stove and slather on the new look. Her backsplash in Louisville, Ky., is used for chalk-jotted recipes or grocery lists.

The small project took just a few minutes and less than $10 dollars, she says.

"It's fun to scrawl the week's menu on it — or a dinner menu, if we're having guests," McMahan says. "Space is at a premium in our small cottage, so the backsplash now does double duty as a knife rack. But there's still room for menus, love notes or silly drawings of our dogs."

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Personal photos

You hang photos throughout your home. Why not dot your backsplash with interesting images to add the accent of your choice?

Julia Blaukopf, a photographer, artist and designer, can help homeowners do just that. Using glass, ceramic or porcelain tiles of varying sizes, she overlays photos to liven those squares. The photo at left depicts a kitchen in Hillsboro, N.J.

"The clients, a young family with two infants, chose images of the sea from my library of images," says Blaukopf, who is based in Philadelphia. "I photographed the image in Venice."

The price for this type of project can range from a couple hundred dollars for a small home wall to as much as $100,000 for a "large-scale commercial project," Blaukopf says.

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Aged copper

From cookware to ceilings, copper feels at home in the kitchen. But here's a backsplash made from pure copper sheets that quickly aged into a patina finish, which normally takes years to acquire. The folks at Colorcopper.com, based in Franklin, Tenn., have dubbed this time-mimicking process "the earth burial method," and it comes after a decade of experimentation, they say. 

The company makes each backsplash by using heavy, 24-gauge copper sheets that are roughly as thick as a credit card, says Robin Thorpe, business-development executive at Colorcopper.com.Handy homeowners can add the copper to their walls using a construction adhesive. Colorcopper.com offers matching edge trim, seam pieces and inside corner pieces to accommodate most kitchen layouts, along with 18 finishes for the prime section of backsplash.

If you do it yourself, the backsplash takes a few hours to put up, Thorpe says. The average price for a Colorcopper.com backsplash is $500. Installers may charge $250.

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Legos

A Chilean homeowner who still maintains a child's eye for fun design schemes opted to used Legos — yes, Legos — for a backsplash. The design caught the gaze of U.S. Lego-lover Matthew Falconieri, who posted the eye-popping backsplash on a website he devotes to the plastic building blocks.

"I cannot wait till I can do this to a kitchen I live in and call my own," Falconieri says. "Aside from my love of this product, it's a fun, easy way to spice up the kitchen. It's durable, cleanable, colorful, adds character and can always change if you are so inclined to change it every time and build again."  

The cost for a Lego backsplash would be roughly $100, he says, enough about two buckets of the bricks plus a fair amount of professional glue.

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Reclaimed wood

If you have an artsy side — and if you love earthy looks — there's really no reason to buy anything new for a new backsplash.

Case in point: this section of wall redesigned by Janelle Pietrzak in her loftlike Philadelphia rental. Several years ago, she was living in the city's Northern Liberties neighborhood when she looked at her cooking space and yearned for change.

"I wanted to install a temporary backsplash (and) wall treatment that would give a rustic feel to the open space," Pietrzak says. "The wood was taken from discarded palettes, so the project was pretty much free."

She found the palettes, discards from a factory, on nearby city streets. She simply screwed the planks into her wall and then affixed a metallic strip on which she hung her cleaver and other knives.

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Wine corks

While this home is in Boxford, Mass., north of Boston, the kitchen's feel is definitely Italian. During its renovation, the owner wanted to tie in a nook that housed a cappuccino maker and a wine rack.

The solution from designer Deanna Junge? A backsplash built from wine corks.

"We bought a couple of cases of wine corks," says Junge, director of business development for Landmark Finish Inc. in Andover, Mass. "A lot of restaurants keep their corks and sell them in cases. We used a band saw to cut each in half and just put a finishing nail in each one."

The cost for this treatment, she says, is about $55 per square foot — comparable to granite. This backsplash is about 8 square feet.

"We have done some amazingly radical work. But this cork backsplash on our website has gotten more phone calls (than other projects)," Junge says. "It just seems to catch people's eye."

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Beer-bottle caps

One day, Brandy Gerber of Ida, Mich., decided her backsplash needed some sprucing up. She and her husband enjoy beer. Inspiration struck.

Using a plywood base, some Mastic, some sealer and dozens of beer caps that she had saved, Gerber put a fizzy, funky spin on her kitchen wall.

"We both love it and have plans to expand on it and also add a wine-cork backsplash in another area of our kitchen," says Gerber, who operates Brandy Gerber Fine Art. "Everyone who sees it has says how cool and unusual the backsplash is.

"We also get lots of fun teasing because all of those caps came from beers that were consumed at our house. True beer connoisseurs like to see all the different varieties and breweries that are represented in the piece."

The total cost for supplies for the 4-by-3-foot backsplash was about $40, she says.

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Sea shells

One company doesn't sell sea shells by the seashore; it sells sea shells via its network of retailers, for use in beachy backsplashes.

Los Angeles-based Solistone, an importer and distributors of tile and stone products, may appeal to homeowners' seafaring sensibilities with its Galapagos treatment.

"It's a standing sea-shell mosaic, so it's got some relief it," meaning a layered and jagged look, says Kristin Barker, Solistone's vice president of marketing. "It's made from material that comes from the inside of abalone (edible sea snails) and oyster shells. They take that material and combine it with resin, so you can dye it any color. Ours is a gold-green. But the color is customizable by special order."

Sheets of the finish, available in 12-by-12-inch squares, interlock to give a seamless appearance, offering fairly simple installation for do-it-yourselfers. Each Galapagos square costs about $47.79.

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Pebbles

Maybe you love the outdoors. Maybe you adore it so much that you want to bring a bit of an earthy feel into your kitchen. But you don't necessarily want your cooking area to resemble a farmhouse or a mountain cabin.

Inspired by river rock, Solistone's freeform-glass collection is designed to look like a blanket of blackened pebbles.

"The glass was made to create a modern edge. So instead of getting something organic, you're getting something with a more contemporary flair," Barker says. "It's also more formal because it's a polished surface."

Freeform glass comes in 12-by-12-inch tile sheets that interlock and are easy to stick onto thin-set mortar while disguising seams, Barker says. If you install it yourself, Solistone suggests you use sanded grout and a grout sealer.

The tiles cost $24 per square foot.

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Antique mirror

When designer Paige Schnell helped remodel a home in Cinnamon Shore, Texas, three years ago, she eschewed a ho-hum tile backsplash for truly Southern style. She picked an antique mirror look because she thought it "would be a fun design element and a great reflective and cleanable surface," she wrote on the blog for her company, Tracery Interiors in Rosemary Beach, Fla.

Installation required four basic steps. First, the designers measured the space for the backsplash. Next, they divided that dimension into 11- by-14-inch rectangles and ordered mirrored tiles to match. They then used a professional finisher to give the mirrored pieces a scratchy and faded antique flavor. Finally, they had an installer glue the mirrored tiles to the wall.

Since that Texas project was completed, manufacturers such as Ann Sacks Tile & Stone have offered mirrored tiles with a similar finish. Ann Sacks' Versailles for example, costs $86.95 per square foot.

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