Travertine
Tivoli, IT — seam 4
A freshwater limestone laid down in bands, full of open pores where gas escaped as it formed. We buy it unfilled. Most suppliers inject resin into the holes; we would rather you could see what the stone actually is.
Studio
Porto, PT · Weymouth, UK
Four people, two workshops, a short list of quarries.
Basalt is four people, two workshops and a short list of quarries. We make a small number of objects out of stone and clay, and we publish what each one is made of, what it weighs and who finished it.
01
The studio
Since 2019
The studio started in 2019 in a former tannery in Porto, because the floor there could take the weight. It still can, and we are still in it. A second bench opened in Dorset in 2020, next to the limestone, for the simple reason that moving stone is the most expensive thing we do.
We are not a design studio that outsources making, and we are not a workshop that takes commissions. We design a thing, build the tooling to make it, and then make it for as long as people want it. Nothing is discontinued to make room for a new season, because there are no seasons.
What that produces is a catalogue of twelve objects, four materials and no colourways. It is a deliberately small surface. It also means that when something is wrong with an object, we know exactly who made it and on which fixture, and we can fix it.
Porto — bench two, finishing
We would rather make twelve things for thirty years than two hundred things for two.
02
Materials
Four, and no more
Portland limestone
Dorset, UK — Bowers bed
Cut from the same beds as most of London. It is soft enough to turn cleanly and hard enough to survive being dropped once. The shell fragments in it are around 150 million years old.
Carrara marble
Carrara, IT — two quarries
Metamorphosed limestone, close-grained enough to hold a nine-millimetre wall. We use the grey-veined bianco rather than the statuario, because it costs a third as much and looks better in a kitchen.
Stoneware
Porto, PT — studio-blended
Blended in the workshop from three clays and fired to 1 260 °C, at which point it stops being porous and starts being permanent. The iron speckle is in the body, not the glaze.
03
Makers
Paid directly
04
Repairs
Send it back
Everything we sell can be repaired. Stone chips and clay breaks, and both can be filled, re-turned or re-fired. Send it back and we will quote you honestly; often it is cheaper to repair than to replace, and when it is not, we will tell you that too.
We do not run sales, we do not do Black Friday, and we write four times a year at most.