Getting The Brush-Off

By Emerson Schwartzkopf

Sometimes, you need to read something twice – maybe three or four times – to make sure the words are really there. In a spot between the incredulous and the inane, the result leaves you … well, just plain dumfounded.
For 2003, I thought the winner here would be some of the many missives of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi information minister with a gift for stating the opposite of the obvious. Even after he turned up in Baghdad months after U.S. and U.K. forces overran Iraq, he could still offer statements such as, “The information was correct, but the interpretations were not.”
Then I took a look at a recent issue of Architectural Digest and saw the lavish layout of a Palm Beach, Fla., residence of a top fashion designer. Finding stonework in AD takes plenty of page-flipping, but this particular set of rooms featured some sharp-looking marble flooring.
The floors turned out to be as advertised; several rooms showed the telltale wisps of a cream-white stone in the “before” pictures of the residences, with some very nice complementary stone colors added in the renovation.
So what did the famous designer install as new stone? He didn’t. He had an artist paint faux marble on top of real marble.
As a service to readers, here’s the last sentence again, so you don’t need to back up and find your place again: He had an artist paint faux marble on top of real marble.
The original “terrible” white marble, according to the designer, was in every room. “It was so cold,” he said, and the result is a suite of rooms with vivid colors and marble designs painted on marble.
I have no beef with the designer, and I’m not about to argue fashion with him; anybody who provided chic wear for Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Barbra Streisand and Laura Bush can easily hold his own. Nor do I hold anything against Architectural Digest – aside from envy over their massive page count of advertisements – and at least give them credit for showing something in stone.
If anybody should be embarrassed that a top designer would appear in an A-list publication with stone floors painted with fake stone finishes, it’s us. We’re not representing stone at its full potential, and we aren’t getting the right message to the right people – our customers.
Admittedly, Architectural Digest may be a poor example. The tastes run long to plush sofas, deep reds and wood. Somewhere, two forests are falling on a monthly basis: one for the thick press runs of AD, and the other for all the interiors in maple, oak and ash from coast-to-coast.
The abundance of wood flows through most high-end design and architectural magazines, since the byword in interiors today seems to be warmth. Whether it’s commercial or residential, the overall theme is to be comfortable, cozy or whatever word comes to mind to give an area a nice, intimate feel. It makes the spaces, in a word, personal.
And stone? So cold, whether it’s the opinion of a world-class couturier or a large segment of Italian interior designers polled in a study last year. Bring up the idea of using stone throughout an interior, and it’s like suggesting a design theme of Early City Morgue.
Start talking to any group of retail consumers– those design-it-yourself folks who walk into a showroom, take home samples, and repeat the process several times before making a decision – and you’ll find stone is anything but a benign, impersonal material. Selection becomes a highly personal matter, with hours spent trooping through the yard in an intense mission of discovery before finding the right slab.
Sure, stone sounds cold. Take a good look at well-selected and -worked stone, though, and the minerals and veins and patterns bring out a life and depth that can easily go beyond the kitchen countertop and bathroom vanity.
That message isn’t getting to designers and architects who rarely walk through the showroom door. Old stereotypes die hard, and the magic of stone is tough to convey to people who see stone as cold, expensive and consistently available in only a few varieties. That series of misconceptions diverts major work to a variety of other materials, including a heavy use of cast stone.
Meanwhile, stone fabrication appears to be one of the strongest niches in the construction and renovation industries. The growth in fabrication even came to the attention of the technology crowd in an op-ed article by business author Virginia Postrel in the July issue of Wired, so we’re not operating in some obscure backwater of the economy.
Getting the message out about stone to designers and architects is less than a front-burner issue for many shops, considering that the phones continue to ring with customer calls and an eight-hour day is a major disappointment. But, there are important clients that need a re-introduction to stone, because they’ll be consistent customers instead of the once-in-a-decade suburban remodelers. They need to learn about the wide variety of stone and the automated workflow of production, and how something that once would be impossible or expensive is now commonplace and affordable.
Unfortunately, this is a job that calls for one-on-one contact. A general-awareness campaign can soften up a large audience, but it’s the personal touch that will bring stone to life for designers. Just getting those face-to-face meetings can be tough, but it’s the kind of attitude that will give its due and make it more an everyday material than a unique accent.
And, if anything, you won’t have to read twice about someone painting a false marble finish on perfectly good marble. They’ll be sold on the real thing.

This article first appeared in the August 2003 print edition of Stone Business. ©2003 Western Business Media Inc.