From the factory floor to the wall

Patterns are Clay's modular line: artist-designed tiles, repeatable and combinable, that carry a work across a wall. The January 2026 roster leap took Clay from its street-art founders to international ceramics and design names — thirteen artists, and the strongest photographed catalogue to date.

The founding collaboration set the register: Vhils's Rasura, a carved-tile edition inspired by the Orly Strates Urbaines mural — edition of 30. Around it, the founding artists and the expanded roster each brought an edition of their own, hand-produced and signed. The launch line was photographed by Rui Aguiar — the Rasura and Serpente sets — with JonOne's portrait work by Alexander Silva.

Clay's high-value tier: bespoke, site-specific tile installations co-created with artists, hand-produced in the Barreiro atelier. The proof-of-concept came at monumental scale — Vhils's Strates Urbaines, 11,132 tiles spanning 35 by 7 metres through the new Orly Airport metro station in Paris.

The work has begun moving from the store into architecture. Monte Palace in Madeira took delivery of the first Clay commission in June 2025 — a carved cobalt azulejo panel set into the estate's gardens. In Lisbon, a red-and-white carved-tile portrait panel rises through the lobby of Hotel 1904 Benfica: Clay's first hospitality reference.

Clay announced its first collaboration in December 2024 and publicly launched in June 2025 as CA Group's contemporary-azulejo house, presented by Underdogs, with four founding artists — Vhils, AkaCorleone, JonOne and Kruella d'Enfer — each invited to reinterpret the Portuguese tile as an artistic canvas, under the tagline "Break the Mold."

From that founding line, the catalogue has grown to thirteen artists — but the method is unchanged: traditional azulejo technique, contemporary design, everything handcrafted in Portugal.