Alabaster imposes its soft minerality on interiors and designers’ collections with fragility and sensitivity. Like onyx, it seduces by its translucent properties and its ribbon-like grain, but differs from it by its ethereal whiteness. A diaphanous, almost monastic beauty, much sought after by fashionable brands and designers – Mathieu Lehanneur, Jordi Veciana, Arnold Chan and Buji – who each revisit the material in their own way, playing with its light effects. Let’s take a look.
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Composition
GYPSUM & CALCITE
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Color
WHITE
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Particularity
TRANSLUCENT
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Style
MONASTIC
Sweet interiors
When the liturgy enters into communion with lithotherapy
This monastic/mineral duality was explored ten years earlier by Mathieu Lehanneur for the furniture of the choir of the church of St Hilaire in Melle. There, the French designer provoked the meeting of liturgy and lithotherapy by alternating white Namibian marble and alabaster as a way of highlighting the attention paid to the telluric energies of the stones in the construction of Romanesque churches.
Dialogue between material, perfume and light
Founded in Gstaad in 2021 by German-born designer Sophie Margaux, Buji initiates a dialogue between material, fragrance and light. Cast in a meticulously sculpted crystalline vessel, the candles explore the sensuality and beauty of the medium through infinitely sumptuous luminous olfactory creations.
Totemic lamps
A quest for sumptuous sculptures that has not escaped the designers and editors of the moment: Jordi Veciana, Simone & Marcel, Arnold Chan and Allied Maker. Each in their own way, these “albatrosses” seal the light in the material and create a veined and ethereal glow that makes the luminaire an object of art to be contemplated.
Organic lines, mystical aesthetics
Despite its rigid and inflexible appearance, alabaster can bend to the desires and fantasies of designers. The latest example: the Aqua Fossil collection by the Barcelona-based studio Amarist thwarts the material’s fixed lines and envisages it as a mouldable plastic element. Through organic forms and mystical aesthetics, alabaster is exalted, transcended.
