MEMBER SPOTLIGHT ——————————— sponsored by I started in the tile industry almost 40 years ago, working as an apprentice. My first day on the job was spent at a mud box with a mud hoe in my hands. When I started out, everything we did was mud. All walls and floors were hand mudded. It wasn’t too long that my tile mechanic had a hawk and trowel in my hand and was teaching me how to mud walls and mud floors. We did mostly commercial work and I traveled all over the Southeastern U.S. We did a lot of work at Walt Disney World, and one of the coolest projects at Disney was work- ing on the world’s largest sundial building, when it opened in 1991. It was designed by architect Arata Isozaki and holds the Guinness World Record of being the world’s largest sundial. We helped tile the outside facade with 3” round green circles, one at a time. After traveling for 15 years doing tile work in the Southeast, I hung up my commercial work boots and married an interior designer and formed a design-build business based in Orlando, Fla. I continued to install tile, but in high-end residen- John Roberts Designs, LLC: from mud to membership and beyond Roberts tells the tale of 40 years in the tile industry, and still going strong Roberts worked installing tile on the world’s larg- est sundial at Walt Disney World, in 1991. 62 TileLetter | December 2018