RF Studio’s stone tables map Peru’s shifting landscapes, from Amazon to Andes

Sometimes you come across a design so unusual in its appearance that you question how it came to be. In RF Studio’s Mapa de Suelos ('Soil Map') – a series of 13 experimental stone tables launched today (17 April 2025) by the Lima-based art and architecture practice – different types of stone appear to melt into each other, making a material associated with solidity feel almost fluid.

Each table is composed of fragments of Peruvian stone – marble, travertine, onyx – joined with remarkable precision to create a kind of sculptural geology. The designs are based on abstractions of aerial views of the Andes, Amazon, and Pacific desert – landscapes to which RF Studio founder Rafael Freyre, whose family hails from the highlands of Peru, has long been drawn.

'The origin of Mapa de Suelos was an encounter,' Freyre tells Wallpaper*. 'Between philosophy, images of the Peruvian landscape, and a need to connect them with the body as an emotional, tactile, and territorial experience.'

While studying fine art in Amsterdam, Freyre came across Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias – spaces layered with meanings that resist easy definition. 'It gave me a conceptual way to understand Peru’s complex, overlapping realities,' he says. 'Peru holds immense ecological and cultural diversity in condensed territories.'

For Freyre, the impulse to make these tables came from a desire to express that complexity physically. 'My imagination became a kind of living geology, shaped by water, natural forces, and constant transformation.'

Each piece is handmade in collaboration with master stonesman Roberto Román, using stone fragments considered waste by Peru’s extractive industries. 'These aren’t materials you can buy in a shop,' Freyre says. 'They’re found, selected, and assembled with intention. The goal is for each object to feel like a piece of territory – not just a table or a sculpture, but something you inhabit.'

The process is slow and exacting, beginning with visual references tied to soil movement, mineral cycles, and water erosion. The studio creates sketches and collages, testing joints and compositions. 'Inca stonework has influenced our approach,' Freyre notes. 'The joints are crucial, and we always check with Roberto for technical feasibility, pushing for increasingly complex, sometimes invisible, connections.'

Working with reclaimed offcuts poses challenges – availability depends on weather, location, and sheer chance – but this limitation is also the project's strength. 'Peru, with its ancient geology, offers a wide range of rare stones that aren't typically seen as valuable,' Freyre says. 'They’re often treated as waste, but we approach them as precious materials. We collect and catalogue them, and then start composing with them.'

The studio’s most ambitious table to date, ‘Table N°7’, was commissioned by Central, the Lima restaurant led by chef Virgilio Martínez. Like Martínez, who uses altitude and geography to shape each dish, Freyre seeks to reflect the territory through form.

'Tradition should be expanded,' he says. 'I believe the role of artists or designers is to take tradition to unknown places, while also learning from it. Artisans like Roberto carry a lot of history – generations of knowledge. So the first step is to listen and learn from that, to connect with that history. And only after that, to push its boundaries further.'

The full series of 13 works is being presented for the first time at rfstudioperu.com, with three works presented exclusively at Galerie Philia galerie-philia.com

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