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Chen & Kai Romance Stone Into Elegant Furnishings at New York’s Casa Perfect

Set inside Casa Perfect, a historic West Village townhouse spiraling into lavish rooms filled with furniture from contemporary design gallery The Future Perfect, Brooklyn-based designers Chen Chen & Kai Williams present their latest exhibition Romancing the Stone. Calling on the beauty of the ordinary stone, the designers transformed the ordinary material into unexpected forms, such as flowers, mirrors and plant stands. Like a lover, the hardened object becomes soft and vulnerable in the eyes of its beholder.

The collection includes the Geology Table and the Stone Rose light fixture, both built from stones that have either been found or excavated. The Geology Table bares a composition of split stones, revealing minerals otherwise hidden, assembled like puzzles atop a steel framework of legs. To achieve this, the designers worked with a bridge building company to cut 4 inch thick slices from a 1 ton boulder using an 80" blade.

Carl Jung once described the stone as the symbol of our simplest and deepest human experience. For millenniums, humans have been drawn to rocks because they reflect our own sedimentary core, unaltered through time and weather. The Stone Rose fixture, an exemplary addition to the show that speaks to both the delicacy and resilience of the artists’ material, proudly displays translucent petals sliced thinly enough to emit light. “For the Stone Roses, we used a small slab saw used normally to cut geode slices,” explains the duo. “We made some experiments with the thickness, there are a few where the slices are thinner, but we found that for the most part those were too delicate, so the thickness we arrived at was the thinnest we could make it without losing too many petals in the process.”

Romancing the Stone is available for viewing by appointment until August 1, 2019. Make an appointment here.