Furniture purveyors are hard-selling marble these days, not that we need much convincing.
The mottled limestone caught our eye at NYC Design Week, where the Observer poked around the Sight Unseen Offsite Show—a sort of indie ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair) on the fringes of Noho. But far from being monolithic, the metamorphic rock had evolved into something fun and light. Think: accent tables, tabletop ornaments and marbleized wallpaper, not to mention its doppelgängers jesmonite, onyx and agate.
On that note, the way to do marble now is via mixed media. It’s darling with copper (especially the rose gold variety) or even as a collage of different hued slabs. Instead of just cookies-and-cream cararra or calacatta, consider cerulean speckles or flaxen veins. If you’re wary of incorporating print, this is an organic way to introduce texture into your home.
Add to that, the fact that the heft makes for a solid piece of furniture. Most of the coffee tables get delivered to your door flat-packed and ready-to-stack—enough of those MDF modulars that blow away like a house of cards! Marble’s cool, hard surface appeals to our settler sensibilities, and perhaps even our hunting and gathering instincts. The showrooms around Soho, at the very least, have been stocking marble fruit plates and cheese boards.
Click on the slideshow for our sliced marble picks.