All fired up: how a mania for antique Delft led to a surprise brush with AI

An obsession with the blue-and-white tiles took Malika Browne to Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam, before modern technology brought the ceramic designs closer to home

- Malika Browne

They started arriving in small, deceptively heavy square parcels, sometimes chipped or cracked, some still clinging to bits of wall.

The packages grew with my husband's online buying confidence and enthusiasm, although he insisted he was restricting himself to no more than £10 a tile.

My husband's Delft tile mania was unleashed by his most reckless online auction purchase to date: a wrecked 14th-century merchant's house in King's Lynn, west Norfolk. When we learned the house had belonged between 1700 and 1750 to a Dutch merchant called Jakob Van Flierden and then to his son, the collecting began in earnest.

Dutch landscapes feel familiar to the residents of East Anglia's flat, wet expanses, so we hopped over the North Sea for some inspiration. We saw Delft tiles in canal houses, as glorious expanses on chimney breasts and trompe l'oeil designs on kitchen walls, but it was their use as skirting boards and around the bottom of staircases that really made us swoon. (We need to get out more, clearly.)

Ever practical Dutch housewives did not want to damage or dirty their whitewashed walls when washing the floors, so a strip of tiles was placed as a hard-wearing buffer. Although absorbed by the paintings in Rembrandt's house, we most admired the Delft tile frieze near the floor. On closer inspection of paintings by Vermeer and de Hooch in the Rijksmuseum, the skirting was there too, miniature paintings within paintings. We vowed to replicate the look at home.

It was on our return that I realised we were not the only ones buying tiles like they were going out of fashion. On my Instagram feed, decorators referenced the tiles in historic houses, and trend-chasing Carrie Johnson, wife of the former prime minister Boris, was one of many home renovators showing off her new blue-and-white fireplace.