Material Provenance

Every piece in the Materia collection carries with it a complete material history. Not a tag, not a label, but a document: the name of the land the timber was felled from, the quarry the stone was cut from, the farm the flax was grown on. This is not marketing. It is accountability.

We began this practice because we discovered, on our first sourcing trip, that most of the materials commonly described as "artisanal" or "natural" have supply chains as opaque as any industrial product. The hand-thrown ceramic made with clay from an unspecified Chinese deposit is not the same object as one made with clay from a specific seam in Oaxaca, worked by the same family for a century.

The Linen

The linen in our Études collection is grown on a single farm in the Calvados region of Normandy. The farm has been in the Leclerc family since 1887, and the flax rotation they use — a seven-year cycle that returns nitrogen to the soil — is unchanged from the system their great-grandfather documented in a handwritten notebook we were privileged to read.

The fiber is retted in the farm's own pond — water-retting, the oldest method, now practiced by fewer than a dozen farms in all of France. The result is a linen of extraordinary softness that still retains the slight roughness that comes from honest production. It cannot be replicated in a factory.

The Stone

The stone bases in the Lumina Arc lighting range come from a single quarry on the island of Bornholm, off the coast of Denmark. It is a granite of unusual warmth — faintly orange-pink in morning light, cooling to grey in the afternoon. The quarry has been operating since 1923 and is now run by the third generation of the Hjorth family.

We visited twice before we were permitted to source from them. On the second visit, we were asked a question we had not been asked before: "What will you do when the stone runs out?" We did not have a good answer. We have been thinking about it ever since. The question is the correct one.