Why we still draw stone by hand

Twice a year we close the studio for a week and fly somewhere with a slab yard. Sometimes it is Verona, sometimes Vietnam, more often Thailand. The trips are not glamorous. They begin in a fluorescent warehouse off a motorway, and they involve standing in front of a piece of stone for forty minutes, walking around it, watching how the daylight moves across it, deciding where the seams will fall.

It would be cheaper and faster to choose marble from a digital catalogue. Most studios do. We do not, because every slab of natural stone is the only one that exists, and we have learned over fourteen years that you cannot judge a slab from a photograph any more than you can judge a person.

A piece of stone is the only material you cannot reorder. If you choose it badly, you live with the choice for the lifetime of the room.

The slab is always drawn by hand before it is cut. We mark the seams in pencil on a printed elevation, fold the elevation, walk it back to the slab, hold it against the surface and decide whether the veining lines up. A good piece of stone is symmetrical only by accident; an honest piece is not symmetrical at all. Both have to be drawn around carefully.

Three moods, one room

Every interior we finish is modelled in three lighting scenes before the construction set leaves the studio. We call them morning, working and dinner. The first is the easy one — daylight does most of the work. The second is the one our clients tend to forget, and the third is the one that always tests the brief.

Dinner light is humble: a single low-Kelvin source, a dimmer that goes deeply low, no ceiling lights overhead, a candle if the room calls for one. We test it by sitting in the room at the prescribed brightness and asking whether the conversation slows down. If it does, the lighting is finished.

The room you remove first

Most renovation briefs that arrive in the studio ask for a new room — a study, a guest suite, a butler’s pantry. We almost always begin the conversation by asking which room can be removed instead. A flat with three small bedrooms and a tiny kitchen is rarely solved by a fourth bedroom; it is usually solved by two bigger ones, and a kitchen that opens to where the family already sits.

This is not a stylistic position. It is arithmetical: the volume of a residence is fixed, and good rooms are larger than the average of the rooms they replace. We start with subtraction because subtraction, properly drawn, is the cheapest move in the budget.

If you are reading this and a residence is forming in your mind, the room you should describe to us first is the one you would happily lose.