Marble is a word we hear all the time in the luxury design world. There are marble baths, marble countertops, marble floors, marble sculptures, marble tiles, you name it. The stone is an elegant—and pricey—addition to any home, but it needn't always be used with utilitarian restraint in dated fashion. In an investigation of the varied ways contemporary designers are incorporating the materials into their projects, Belgian author Thijs Demeulemeester has compiled a sampling of innovative uses of the beautiful stone in a new book titled Stoned: Architects, Designers & Artists on the Rocks ( $65, Lannoo ). Rather than divide the book into sections based on form or use, he separates the projects by color, focusing on the aesthetics of the material itself. From bold kitchens to a bespoke DJ table to a private spa, here are some of our favorite images from the book.
Raw marble.
Inspired by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe’s onyx wall in Villa Tugendhat, architects Tom De Meester and Tine Vliegen of De Meester Vliegen designed this three-ton Verde Patricia marble hanging cabinet in an apartment in Antwerp, Belgium.
De Meester Vliegen also designed this bespoke DJ table of Calacatta marble for a midcentury apartment in Antwerp.
Marble can also be used practically, as in the case of Muller Van Severen’s cutting boards that double as sculptures.
This elegant monochromatic kitchen by Arjaan De Feyter belongs to an apartment inside the Axel Vervoordt Kanaal complex comprising old silos in Wijnegem, Belgium. The travertine grigio slabs provide a contrasting texture to the concrete, tinted ash wood, and mineral plaster walls found elsewhere in the home.
Joseph Dirand designed this Paonazzo marble kitchen for Belgian design company Obumex. “[I]f there is something that comes through his work, it is his clear predilection for modernism and sculpture,” writes Thijs Demeulemeester in Stoned. “To put it bluntly, this kitchen is closer to Brancusi than to Rodin, it is more Le Corbusier than John Lautner. Dirand’s interiors ooze refinement. They are reduced to a purely architectural play of lines, volumes, and light, but without becoming radically empty boxes.”
This mesmerizing pool inside a private spa by Britsom & Philips in Gent, Belgium, features a wall and basin made of Muschelkalk marble from Germany. “By using perpendicular instead of lengthwise cuts to divide the large blocks into smaller ones, an irregular pattern was obtained,” writes Demeulemeester. “The slabs were first sandblasted to make their pores deeper and then brushed to make their surface softer to the touch.”
Stoned: Architects, Designers & Artists on the Rocks .
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