SolidNature’s stone garden of wonders at Milan Design Week

In a glass-walled meeting room overlooking the production floor of stone company SolidNature’s Amsterdam headquarters, CEO David Mahyari is recounting his brand's first big break. 'OMA came by looking for some specific travertines that they hadn’t been able to find,' he recalls. During their visit, partners Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon found not only the travertine they had been looking for but also another stone that they even more urgently needed, for the National Library of Qatar, which they were in the midst of designing. 'It was two or three months before we had even officially registered the company,' says Mahyari, whose brother founded the SolidNature in 2011 before handing over the reins to the thirty-something-year-old CEO in 2018. 'So the relationship started before we officially did.' 

That serendipitous discovery spawned a nearly decade-long relationship (as well as Fondazione Prada's iconic dyed-pink onyx elevator) and for Milan Design Week 2023, SolidNature has once again collaborated with the Dutch firm. This time for their exhibition, 'Beyond The Surface', which will see OMA recreate the journey of quarrying, finishing and crafting stone through an allegorical experience that compares the industrial process to the act of dreaming. 

SolidNature presents 'Beyond the Surface' at Milan Design Week 2023

Set in the basement of the neo-Romanesque Casa Maveri, a private villa in Brera, visitors will venture below ground, and into the realm of sleep, passing through a series of illusory installations that respond to themes such as ‘Confrontation’, ‘Revelation’ and ‘Patience’ – each exhibiting various 'treatments, applications and approaches of designing with natural stone,' says OMA senior architect Giulio Margheri – before emerging into the daylight and consciousness in the home’s sprawling garden.

From our conference room view, we watch a team of men at the opposite end of the building prepare pieces that will soon be shipped to Milan. Engulfed in clouds of marble dust that settle like snow on their black uniforms, they’re carving out the shape of a reclining woman, which will become an anthropomorphic seat designed by the Iranian artist Bita Fayyazi. The sculpture will live in the villa’s garden, alongside an undulating bench titled ‘The Wave’, also by Fayyazi, an installation inspired by Elizabethan theatres by Studio Ossidiana and a party-ready table in glass and travertine by Sabine Marcelis.

This will be the second time the Rotterdam-based Marcelis has joined SolidNature in Milan. At Alcova in 2022, she presented a monolithic bathroom system carved entirely out of pink onyx. However, the designer’s relationship with the company stretches back to 2019, when she called on them to develop the travertine elements in her ‘No Fear of Glass’ exhibition at Barcelona’s Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. This year, Marcelis wanted to create an object visitors could interact with, so she took it upon herself to devise a buffet table and bar that could take centre stage during the week’s events – while also revisiting the same glass and travertine palette she and SolidNature explored four years ago.

The ten-foot-long glass tabletop is marked by a gradient pattern that subtly shifts from yellow to orange to red. The glass is propped up by a series of mismatched stone legs that extrude like islands through the transparent pane, and whose natural tone reflects their corresponding section of the gradient. 'I was trying to find that tension between the manmade and the natural,' she explains of the concept. 'I really wanted to showcase what different ideas can bring to the same materials.' 

Marcelis then shaped the tops of the stone pillars to act as serving platters – for example, milling out concave wells for cradling ice – for staging a conceptual feast by culinary artist Laila Gohar. According to Marcelis, the edible installation will respond to the table’s warm-toned hues. 'Every aspect of the project was determined by the colour palette,' she adds. 'Including the food.'

'The main objective for us as a company is to push boundaries and change the perspective of how we normally use stone and what kind of stones we use,' Mahyari reflects on the nature of the collaboration with the architects, artists and designers who will represent the brand Milan. 'The reason why it works so well is because when they come up with an idea – it is never no. It's always OK, let's try.'

SolidNature - Beyond the Surface is on view from 17 to 23 April 2023

Via Cernaia 1
Milan

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