Bringing Stone into Every Room

You can get them polished, leathered, or honed. They can be bullnosed, ogee-ed, mitered, and coved. They can be translucent or opaque. They have names like “Taj Mahal,” “Brown Fantasy,” and “My Way.” They come from Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Vietnam, Vermont—nearly every country and continent.

Rent out of the earth, zhuzhed up in stunning makeovers, and voila: a shimmering display of pattern and color millions of years in the making lands directly onto your bathroom vanity, floor, kitchen island, dining table, mantle, or bar. The possibilities are endless. It’s enough to make you lose your … uh … marbles.

Marble and quartzite—the ultimate metamorphic organic luxuries—are imparting their idiosyncratic personalities into our homes in unprecedented usages, elevating interior design and stretching the imaginations of homeowners, architects, and designers.

Crystal Lemley and Gregory Allan Ness of Coastal Interiors in Vero Beach have literally pushed the envelope in incorporating high-end stone into their interior design projects—the “envelope” being the walls, floors, ceilings, windows, and doors. They have specified marble and quartzite on just about every surface, often blurring the lines between indoors and outdoors. Lemley particularly relishes designing with stone, given her background in the kitchen and bath business. Known for their modern sensibility, Lemley and Ness are using large-scale, 48-inch-square slabs in bathrooms, kitchens, floors, and fireplaces in a straight-laid pattern. “It’s a more modern feel, and no grout to clean,” says Lemley.

She has also designed furniture pieces made from marble or quartzite. “In a family room, I took a piece of furniture, used the same quartzite that was on a built-in across the room, and had it engineered as a bar/countertop/credenza. Quartzite is much more durable than marble,” she explains.

The firm is creating more furniture pieces incorporating or made entirely of stone. Lemley designed a console table made of quartzite slabs for a client who lived on the third floor of Carlton Vero Beach, an oceanfront building. “We had to have cranes lift it up to the front terrace, where 12 men were waiting to carry it through the apartment out to the rear terrace,” she explains. It was massive: 84 by 18 by 36 inches. Abbate Tile & Marble executed Lemley’s design and delivered the table.

The duo typically run slabs of quartzite floor to ceiling on their fireplace surrounds, sometimes recessing a space for the TV. Producing a clean, sleek look, quartzite is stronger than marble and works best in this application. In bathrooms, whole walls are paved in marble or quartzite, their unique patterns and veining matched for a seamless, enveloping feel. In kitchens, countertops and backsplashes are one continuous slab, with patterns seamlessly, continuously matching.

It all starts with the slabs. “You want to fall in love with your slab first,” says Ness.

At Abbate Tile & Marble, an enfilade of slabs stands ready for selection in an enormous warehouse off Old Dixie Highway. Huge and colorful, with some full of dynamic movement and others calm and reserved, it is virtually a United Nations of stone. Each one has a story to tell.

For certain projects, Vincent Abbate travels with customers to his source in Verona, Italy, where blocks of stone are quarried and brought in from all over the world. “For a project in Fort Pierce, the blocks had to come out of the mountain: one, two, three, four,” he explains. “We made sinks. We made moldings. It took one and a half years to do.” Abbate adds that he’s finally swathing his home in miles of Calacatta Gold marble.

Having a moment now is a quartzite called Cristallo. Abbate jumps into a forklift and moves a slab (the weight of a Volkswagen, he says) over to the open garage door, where it catches the midday sun. Its translucence is mesmerizing.

And we could all use more light in our lives, n’est-ce pas?