Written by
Tomás Abreu
Partner
Samples lie. A polished tile on a meeting-room table tells you almost nothing about how a stone will behave across a forty-metre wall, in rain, at dusk, after ten winters. The only reliable way to choose a stone is to go to where it comes out of the ground.
Three days in Estremoz
In June we spent three days in the marble belt of the Alentejo with the stonemason who is cutting the floors and window sills for the Monte Library. We walked the benches of four working quarries and two abandoned ones, where the cut faces have been weathering for half a century. That second visit was the important one: it showed us exactly how the stone will age.
We left with a decision that surprised all of us. The pale, almost white marble we had drawn for two years turned dull and grey in the abandoned pits. A warmer, more heavily veined stone from the next valley had weathered to a soft honey colour. We changed the specification the same week.
What we look for
Colour matters less than people think. We look at how a stone breaks, how it holds water, how its veins run through a large block, and how much of each block ends up as waste. A material that wastes half of itself on the way to the building is not as natural as it looks.
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