Description
It’s a material that’s strong, beautiful, unique – and millions of years old. Clare Dowdy explores the unstoppable rise of stone in design and architecture.

A material as old as the hills is back in fashion. Designers and architects are rediscovering the delights of stone, whether it's as a table-top feature or an entire building structure. Other materials – steel and concrete for construction, plastic for products – may be cheaper and faster to work with, but stone has some impressive sustainability credentials. Its carbon footprint is relatively small - and it lasts forever.

The 2017 London apartment block 15 Clerkenwell Close proves this first point. With its stone structure and limestone façade, its embodied carbon was reduced by 90%, compared to comparable buildings with steel or concrete frames.

The building features in The New Stone Age, an exhibition (currently closed) of contemporary stone architecture at London’s Building Centre. The show is curated by the creators of 15 Clerkenwell Close: architect Amin Taha of Group Work, engineer Steve Webb of Webb Yates and stone mason Pierre Bidaud. Stone was still popular as a building material until the turn of the 20th Century. But after World War Two, Taha tells BBC Designed, “it was seen as something of the past. Modernism was about concrete, steel and glass.” Stone has been used for cladding since then, but "we're trying to show the technological possibilities of the structural use of stone,” says Webb. Projects featured alongside 15 Clerkenwell Close include an office building in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, by Ensamble Studio, and Studiolada’s tourist office in the French town of Plainfaing.

Stone’s architectural image is being bolstered by new software technology, innovations in manufacturing and a greater understanding of quarrying. These developments can also help stone make a splash inside buildings. The upshot is a basement swimming pool of back-lit golden onyx, and a shiny pink public lift. These have both been realised by Dutch stone company Solid Nature – the former in the Netherlands, the latter at the Fondazione Prada in Venice using a dyed block of onyx.

People increasingly want the authentic beauty and inconsistencies of natural stone – David Mahyari Alongside its sustainable qualities, it’s the material’s one-off nature that really appeals to the design world. “People increasingly want the authentic beauty and inconsistencies of natural stone,” says Solid Nature’s David Mahyari, “imitation ceramic tiles include realistic veins but have a repeat pattern like wallpapers, so you can tell quickly that they’re fake.”