— Material
A morning at the quarry
Stone does not arrive from a catalogue. It arrives from a particular hillside, and we go and see which one.
Every stone order begins with a drive out before sunrise. This is not romance. By ten in the morning the glare has flattened everything to the same pale beige, and a block that will read warm and rose-grey in a north-facing room looks identical to one that will read dead.
So we mark the pieces we want in chalk, in person, block by block, and we do it early. It is slower than ordering by sample chip and it means a project can sit waiting on a delivery for longer than a client would like. We have never found a shortcut that did not eventually show up in the finished wall.
The other reason to go is the cutter. Stone has a grain and a bedding plane, and how a block is cut against them determines whether a floor will wear evenly or begin to flake along one edge in five years. That conversation cannot happen over a purchase order.