Design Miami 2015: Dutch designer Lex Pott and US wallpaper brand Calico have created products that highlight the qualities of stone, including marble furniture and wallpaper covered with stone powder (+ slideshow).
The Fragments exhibition features tables, bowls, a vase and a shelf by Pott, and wallpaper by Calico’s New York-based owners and designers Nicolas and Rachel Cope.
The exhibition was commissioned by New York’s Long term Best gallery, and will travel to its Great Jones Street venue as an expanded model in January.
At Design Miami, Pott is showing a series of tables with approximately quarried marble bases paired with smooth, honed tops produced from the same materials. His collection includes side, coffee and dining tables.
“I have been actually interested in how stone is taken out of the ground, how the uncontrolled top quality of the rough surface contrasts with the honed,” Pott advised Dezeen.
The craggy surfaces are crystallised whilst the smooth surfaces reveal fossils, and much more varied colours and striations.
Associated story: Guy-produced marble by Max Lamb employed to produce camouflaged furniture installation
Pott also hollowed out the bases of the tables to decrease the fat.
The shelf makes use of five distinct varieties of marble, each with a distinct colour, with every shelf utilizing fewer layers of the materials.
“I took my inspiration from architecture,” he mentioned. “The way buildings are heavier on the bottom with thinner walls on the upper floors.”
Also for the exhibition, Long term Best asked Calico to develop coordinating wallpapers that would help generate an environment for the booth.
The brand employed finely woven Belgian linen and crushed stone pigments, like mica and marble, to produce the patterns.
Calico’s wallpapers could evoke landscapes or the striations of a quarry or of stone itself, according to the Copes.
“It truly is up to the viewer to decide,” Rachel Cope informed Dezeen, even though she said that the two the Blue Ridge Mountains in West Virginia’s coal country and to Chinese landscape painting offered inspiration in creating the papers.
Rachel Cope generally generates a hand-painted paper that Nicolas translates into digital form for larger scale manufacturing. Offered the fine high quality of the resources employed in Fragments, Calico plans to supply the series in hand-painted versions only.
Design Miami runs from two to six December 2015 in Miami Seaside, Florida. Tasks and installations on view include an illuminated crystal sphere by Fernando Romero for Swarovski and a pavilion of made of architectural designs by students at Harvard.
Fragments will open in New York on seven January 2016 at the Potential Best in Manhattan, with additional pieces by Pott.
Exhibition photography is by Lauren Coleman.
