Two-Piece Mission & Sand-Cast Clay Tile Roofing

When people in the Valley say “tile roof,” they usually mean concrete tile in an S profile — one piece, machine-made, what tract builders have installed for forty years. Clay is a different animal. It is fired rather than cast, its color runs through the body of the tile instead of sitting on the surface, and the traditional profiles are laid as two separate pieces rather than one.

Two-piece mission tile — also called pan and cover, or pan and cap — is the original Spanish and Mission profile. A trough-shaped pan carries water down the roof, and a barrel-shaped cover caps the seam between pans. It is the look on the California missions, on Spanish Colonial Revival homes, and on the higher-end custom work around Arcadia, the Biltmore corridor, Paradise Valley and north Scottsdale. A Romano variation swaps the rounded pan for a flat rectangular one, which reads more formal and more Tuscan.

Sand-cast clay is cast in sand molds rather than extruded, and every tile comes out slightly different — irregular edges, thickness that varies across the field, color that shifts tile to tile. On a Mediterranean or Southwestern home that irregularity is the entire point; it is what makes a roof look like it has been there a hundred years. It is also genuinely brittle, and it is expensive, which is why it belongs with a crew that has handled it before.

• Two-piece mission (pan and cover) installation, repair, and tile replacement
• Sand-cast clay tile — new roofs and matching into existing ones
• Romano pan-and-cap profiles
• Lift-and-relay underlayment replacement with careful salvage of existing clay
• Sourcing and matching discontinued, custom, or salvaged tile
• Structural load review before moving a home from shingle to clay
• Ridge and hip mortar, bird stops, and traditional finish details