About

Ruth Brayshaw spent eight years as a surface designer at a mid-size tile manufacturer in Portland before moving to Los Angeles in 2015. She handled pattern development for production runs, which meant she understood how tile behaved at scale but rarely got to see a single project through from start to finish. That gap bothered her. In 2017 she left the manufacturer, rented a small studio in Silver Lake, and started taking residential commissions on her own.

The first two years were slow. Ruth took on a kitchen backsplash here, a bathroom floor there, mostly through word of mouth from a few architect friends. The turning point came in late 2019 when a boutique hotel in Echo Park hired her to design a 340-square-foot lobby floor in a Moorish-influenced geometric pattern. The project took four months and required sourcing unglazed terracotta from a supplier in New Mexico. It was the most technically demanding thing she had done, and it got photographed for a regional design publication. After that, the phone started ringing differently.

Today Pure Mosaic Hub handles six to ten projects at a time, a mix of residential and commercial work. Ruth still draws every layout by hand before anything goes into the computer. She added a small workshop program in 2022 because clients kept asking how the work was done, and she found she liked teaching. The studio is open Tuesday through Saturday, and Ruth answers project inquiries herself, usually within one business day.