It started at an airport

My first proper tile job, back in 2000, wasn’t a bathroom. As I told it on Tile Titans:

“We were working on Manchester Airport”

— terrazzo block work, big commercial floors, the kind of job where you learn fast that near enough is not good enough. Airports don’t forgive wonky lines; neither do I.

From there I spent five years with Amatino Tiling, an Italian-run firm — old-school craftsmen who treated tiling as a trade with rules, not a weekend hobby. That’s where the habits set in: prep properly, mind your lines, and never hide a shortcut under grout, because it always, always comes back.

The jump

In my own words from the podcast:

“2005 I moved to the USA.”

Just like that — Manchester to America with a trade in my hands. On the SWIVL Sessions podcast, my advice to anyone standing where I stood was simple:

“Don’t be afraid to make the jump.”

I wasn’t. Twenty years on, Colorado is home.

The American years weren’t a straight line. Carpentry and deck building first, then years with a tile contractor, then remodeling with a house-flipping company — a proper education in how houses here are built, and how they fail. Eventually I went out on my own, and The British Remodeler is what came out the other side.

The rules came with me

Different country, same standards. On Tile Titans I put it this way:

“Stick with the TCNA standards”

and

“treat every single job as if I’m tiling my own house.”

That’s still the whole quality-control department at The British Remodeler — me, on every job, asking whether I’d accept it in my own home. Schluter-certified waterproofing, proper pans, honest timelines. If the answer’s no, it gets redone.

And then, mosaics

A few years ago I stepped back, then came back to the trade on my own terms — as I said in 2023,

“getting back on track in the trade that I love to do.”

Coming back, I split the work in two on purpose: The British Remodeler for remodeling — bathrooms, kitchens, tile, flooring, handyman — and Lion & Crown Mosaics for mosaics only: art, murals and commissions. Why? Because

“creating something different is the way to go forward”

(Tile Titans again.) Cookie-cutter is everywhere. Hand-made isn’t.

So that’s the story: Manchester Airport to the foothills of Pikes Peak. If you’re in Colorado Springs and you want a remodel done by someone who’ll treat it like his own house — you know where I am. Larger remodels are booking into December; smaller tile and handyman jobs can still squeeze into November.

— Simon Beames, The British Remodeler · 719-521-8312

Quotes from Tile Titans (“TTL -E1”, 2021; “The Outsiders Episode 6”, 2023) and SWIVL Sessions (“Lasting Work, Not Fast Fads”).