How La Maya Restaurant came to life

Bringing a modern twist to a traditional Mexican design and cuisine

By Clay Imports

Hellertown is a small, family-oriented community in Northampton County, Pennsylvania; the perfect place to visit if you want to wind down. The town seamlessly blends natural attractions with a vibrant social scene and a downtown area that is home to incredible small businesses. One of these gems is La Maya, a Mexican Modern Cuisine and cocktail lounge, born from years of experience in the restaurant industry and a desire to create something new and exciting. We had the chance to speak with the owner and the design duo about their experience building La Maya and how it brings a groovy style to Pennsylvania.

The idea behind La Maya

CJ Moyer is the creative director & owner of Moyer Design Co., a design and marketing agency for the Food and Beverage industry. After working for other spaces, he decided to open one on his own, Presley's Cocktail Bar. The experience was so positive and thrilling, that he decided to team up with Rogelio Romero to start La Maya.

“The idea came in stages. We started small and allowed the concept to build itself up. After doing a crazy amount of R&D we landed on the concept for La Maya.” The concept is inspired by adding a modern twist to a typical Mexican restaurant. The looks aim to be reminiscent of the riviera of the Mexican península: the summer dishes of this restaurant are heavily influenced by the ones you can find in places like Tulum and Cancun.

La Maya wants to be a staple in any visit to Hellertown, a place that continues to push creativity in Mexican cuisine. And as such, the architecture of the new place had to be on the same level. Luckily for us, we have been chosen to achieve the vision CJ and Rogelio had.

The design of La Maya

CJ and Rogelio had a very clear idea of the ambience they wanted to create in the restaurant: “We wanted to find a happy medium between traditional mexico and fun and funky. We used a lot of heavy bold greens, textures, tiles, and imagery to bring a fun experience. The feeling is warm, welcoming, and cozy”.

Enter April and Gabrielle Wilson, a mother-daughter design duo and the creative heads behind La Maya. Their design firm, Locust Bloom, specializes in creating environments “with the intention of curating environments that make people want to stay a while, making something to think about”. However, they had never designed a restaurant from scratch before. CJ, known for working with genuine people, immediately knew that they would create a wonderful space together.

The goal was simple: to create an unforgettable space. Fortunately, April and Gabriele pretty much had a white canvas to create, experiment, do and redo at will: “We tested every technique of transformation from painting a psychedelic mural, to wallpapering, to excessively tiling, to wainscoting, to testing another wallpaper, to applying vinyl, to adding and deducting walls, to painting all over it again [...] but each decision we made was deeply thoughtful, tested, questioned, reimagined, and ultimately loved as a team before executing the final vision.

The Clay Imports tiles in La Maya

After ordering numerous samples from various tile vendors, we realized that Clay Imports had everything we needed! April and Gabrielle approach us to tile the space and our tiles are featured in 3 spaces: The main dining room, the bathroom and the walling of some of the spaces.

First, the floors. They decided to use our Smooth Satin Saltillo tiles for the main area and use our spring vocho tiles to divide the bar. The bar is also crowned with our glazed thin brick forest tiles, creating an elegant yet inviting environment that seeks to emulate the rainforest of the Mayan riviera.

Of course, one of the challenges this line brought was to even the level of the tiles. Saltillo tiles are thicker than the tiles they decided to use. As the designers put it: “We wanted the tile to feel organic in nature and not be a perfectly clean layout. In trying to accomplish this feat, we did the thinnest possible non sand blackish green grout, and used raw edges. Mitering the edges to create an angle and using grout covered the sharpness of the edge but also gave it more of a natural finish, if you will.”

Handmade tiles exhibit natural variations, which are inherent traits of natural materials like Terracotta. These variations in color, texture and sheen are not defects but rather a natural part of the product. We highly recommend ordering samples before making a final purchase to confirm and appreciate these natural variations in each tile.

The restaurant has an interior space they decided to call the “Queen’s room” coated in a deep raspberry, the walls and ceiling butt heads with that saturation and reveal a dustier, peachy-rose. To bring more privacy to this area, they decided to use our breeze blocks to create a barrier wall and privacy area adjacent to the hallway entrance to bathroom and back of kitchen area.

But one of our favorite uses of the Clay Imports tiles in La Maya is definitely the bathroom. “We wanted the bathroom to talk to the rest of the space by mixing organic with more linear patterns in a maximalist way without mimicking all the other spaces within the restaurant.”  They decided to use 3 similar earth tones of our recycled clay tiles (Confetti, Americano, Barro) and arrange them in a non conventional way to create a fantastic look with a pretty layout.

The La Maya experience

CJ knows that design is a key part of a restaurant, what they called the Wow factor: “Our next generation of diners aren’t going to settle for half assed designed restaurants. People are looking for an experience and part of that experience is to be had by the way you feel when you walk through our doors.” And La Maya is the perfect place to achieve this: everything has been planned in order to bring a whole new experience and the Clay Imports Mexican tiles are one of the many little pieces that contribute to the overall design.