I Keep Seeing Design-y Rocks
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Until recently, the highest concentration of rock-based design I’d ever seen was in the 1994Flintstoneslive-action movie. Which thematically makes sense; stone is quite literally prehistoric. A pebble on the beach could have taken anywhere from a handful to millions of years to form. Of course, naturalists of design and architecture —Isamu Noguchi, Frank Lloyd Wright — have toiled with it.Max Lamb, ever committed to durability, made a memorable collection that showed at Johnson Trading Gallery in the late aughts. But recently, the material is being called on to bring sensuality to the austere interiors we’ve been experiencing in ourpost-Memphis, chubby-furniture hangover.
I’m not talking about Carrara marble or travertine, not even terrazzo. What have been dominating galleries from Marta to Blunk Space and homes from London to Los Angeles are once-unsung rocks: boulders and pebbles pulled from beaches and brooks, mountains and roadsides, and left pretty much as they were found, with the intended objects hand-built around their earth-given shapes in glass, metal, water, or wood.
During this fall’s Design Miami Paris,Dirk Meylaerts’s pearwood dining tablewas lit like an altar in Galerie Paradis, its traditional wooden bow-tie joinery replaced by X-shaped stones his children found on the beach in Normandy. At September’s Collectible fair in New York, Hannah Martin’s showcaseIn Praise of FollyfeaturedThomas Yang’s wooden pedestal tableanchored by a river-rock base in a traditional example ofishibadatewoodworking. Over the summer,Culturedprofiled Charlie Marder, an East End “rock salesman” who supplies monumental boulders to artist Lee Ufan and landscape-architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand. In May, while theSecret StrategistcoveredJake Coan’s Touchstone Cone table lamps— stones from Little Cranberry Island, Maine, topped with slim brass stems and coned paper shades — Mariah Nielson was launching her firstcollection of boulder-based furniture and tablewareat Blunk Space, in West Marin, California, primordial pieces that would not look out of place in Fred and Wilma’s Bedrock abode.
The fascination isn’t limited to studios. Cultural adviser Laura de Gunzburg’s London home featuresa mirror propped on granite slabsfrom Alicja Kwade (whose new solo show in Belgium centers on a massive boulder of lapis lazuli). BothPhillip Lim’s North Fork beach houseandEllen Van Dusen’s upstate cabinfeature pebbles as doorknobs and cabinet pulls, respectively. And just weeks ago, Adam Charlap Hyman shareda photo of the Los Angeles homehe designed for actress and filmmaker Lucy Bidwell, centered on a rock-vase planter from the Tropics, Inc.
In each instance, rocks provide a detail that goes beyond handmade into the inarguably real. They are shaped by pressure, wind, and water, the natural friction of tectonic plates and tides. “You’re looking at time,” says Nielson, who was drawn to the material because it forced “extreme patience” in an age of increasing speed and ease. Los Angeles sculptor Lily Clark sees stone as a kindred element to her medium of water. “It doesn’t fight against water but is enhanced by it,” she says of the basalt and bluestone she sources for her fountains and clocks. Kai Williams, who first began working with rocks out of necessity — they were free — at his eponymous Brooklyn studio with Chen Chen, calls their appeal instinctive. “I have a 3-year-old who comes home with pockets full of rocks,” Williams says. “It’s human nature.”
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While rehabbing a Sullivan County cabin she bought with her siblings, Van Dusen, founder of Dusen Dusen, wanted hardware that “brought the outside in.” Together, they gathered pebbles from the property, a nearby creek, and a rock shop called Crystal Connection. “They had to feel good in the hand,” she says. “Obviously, you don’t want any sharp edges, but a little texture can help with grip.” Once epoxied to cabinet bases, the stones became perfectly imperfect cabinet and drawer pulls — and if one pops off, she simply glues it back on.
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Funky Rock Designs out of Eliot, Maine, specializes in home goods hewn from stone — stone match strikers, place-card holders, and a bottle opener that design wiz and communications consultant Gillian Sturtevant currently has bookmarked for purchase in an open tab on her phone. These bisected bookends are weighty enough to hold in place the collection of geology tomes they’ll inspire.
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Keisuke Iwata’s product description for this piece succinctly states, “I am a stone vase.” Smaller than a fist, each one has a small hole to hold water and a single stem.
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Forget singing bowls. This proper scholar’s rock is a meditation aid for a master. Collected along Japan’s Nakasendo River during the Edo period, it acts as a microcosmic reminder of vast mountain ranges and deep time — almost enough to make up for a window with a “building view.”
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Single taper holders that will not wobble. These gray speckled Indonesian river stones can triple threat as paperweights or doorstops when not ignited.
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Basalt can form in a matter of minutes, but the density of this volcanic-rock serving platter, which is resistant to heat, water, and damage of almost any kind, can keep it in play for eons should your distant descendants desire.
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Bringing an outdoors-in moment to even the most buttoned-up interiors is a rock planter, such as the one weighting the airy, bent-bamboo desk in Bidwell’s den, designed by Charlap Hyman & Herrero in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood.
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During his first foray into table lamps, lighting designer Coan was problem-solving a base and found a solution outside his studio window: “I’m right next to a river, and there are a lot of rocks out there doing the thing I needed them to do.” The design of his Touchstone Cone lamps, which turn on with a tap and dim with a hold, is centered on each individual rock. Coan says he looks for indentations or steps that naturally indicate where to touch, so “it’s instructive to the user.”
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On Majorca, animator and 3-D designer Diego Sánchez Barceló collects pebbles from mountains and beaches, then turns them into anchors for wineglasses and sculptural lighters. “There’s a tradition here of working with stone as a material,” he says. The results are functional but slyly humorous — goblets perched on stones with “almost a wink. It’s a little funny statement on the table.”
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Fisher-Price colorscapes bloom from hand-selected rocks in tubular fixtures designed to hold and dispense equally colorful masking tapes. Each fixture is 3-D printed by Kyoto, Japan–based design studio Shinkogeisha to fit a scan of the untreated natural stone it crowns. Think of it as a fantastical grown-up desk accessory for a former Pet Rock owner.
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Marder, one of the East End’s most in-demand landscapers, can sell you what he calls a “commodity rock” for under $100 — that is, a stone with personality but not the delicacy he’s known for. The more expensive boulders in his collection, priced well into the thousands, are treated like fine art. “Most rocks are mishandled by excavators or contractors who push and scrape, bang and brutalize them without any sort of idea that they have character,” he says. “I treat them with respect.” Sourced from across the country over 50 years and moved with swings, pads, and specialized equipment, each stone is placed by hand according to its inherent “movement.” As Marder explains, “Every time you touch a rock, the cost increases.” Send inquiries to info@marders.com.
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