UC57
old french oak beams and travertine stone
160x50x45 cm
Year built
2023
Function
Aux Table
Status
On Display
Casa Decor 2023. One of the spaces was sponsored by a major stone manufacturer, in collaboration with one of the leading interior design studios in the country.
They knew our work. The brief was simple: use some stone.
Until that point we had finished a number of pieces with conventional 20mm stone slabs. We wanted to do something different. Iñigo had an idea: instead of two materials sitting alongside each other, what if they became geometrically inseparable — not a wood piece with a stone top, but a single form where neither material could exist without the other.
From above, UC57 reads as a rectangular block in two colours: white travertine followed by the warm blonde of oak. From the front, a perfect square. But viewed from the side, something unexpected happens — on the interior face of the joint between the two materials, a wide frame is drawn, and somewhere within that frame the transition between stone and wood takes place. Wood we accept as shapeable. Stone, less so. Both together, shaped into a continuous geometric form — that is something else entirely.
The travertine was machined on an industrial five-axis CNC belonging to our workshop neighbours — an expensive process, but the only way to achieve that precision in stone. The oak we sculpted by hand. When you see the finished piece, what is remarkable is how two materials made by such opposing processes manage to disguise each other so completely.
UC57 works equally as a bench or as a side table.
