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New stories, old stones
In the Cros-de-Cagnes showroom, there are all these families of bookends, trays, pocket emptiers and end tables, designed and made from offcuts from the Marbrerie Provençale. Visit.
By Eve Chatelet
Designer Dom Trapp and Denis Riocreux at the Marbrerie Provencale du Huat de Cagnes, which offers a wealth of unique marbles and rocks.
They considered calling their project "Some People's Waste, Other People's Treasures," but ultimately settled on Neolithic. A name that etymologically means "new stone." For them, it's a new way of looking at rocks, but above all, it provides the key to the approach of Denis Riocreux and Dominique Trapp. The former, a marble worker with three generations of expertise, and the latter, a designer with a passion for nature. For almost three years, they've been imagining collections of unique objects for the home and office using scraps from the Marbrerie Provençale in Cagnes-sur-Mer. "I'd had the idea of creating simple objects from rocks in the back of my mind for a long time," explains Dominique. "Meeting Denis Riocreux was the right one. When he opened the doors to his park to me, we were able to imagine and create collections of objects that showcase these beautiful materials."
Monopoly and Tetris from our childhood
Today, Parisian design galleries are beginning to choose the Cagnes-based brand's creations, exhibited in the region at the Good Design Store in Nice and at the Archibiolab architecture firm in Antibes. "When you produce gravel from old stones, it's recycling, but when you make small houses from them to serve as bookends, you add value to the object; that's upcycling," continues the designer, whose products are born from unused resources. Existing and surplus marble or granite, from periods of time when machines are vacant and expertise is available. Like the bookcases that reach up to the ceilings of their seafront showroom, which he invented, their marble objects often have a modular appearance.
Minerality of Arabescato
Just as one would have kept a child's soul after collecting minerals in his youth, Dominique's gaze lights up when he begins to detail the materials from which his objects are composed: "In France, there is the blue stone of Savoy and the lava of Bouzentès which comes to us from the Massif Central. Two types of rock that I have associated in a bookend. I have also created small houses in blue stone from Hainaut with polished, flamed or brushed sides, which allows us to compare the differences in treatment." If at the beginning he made a lot of drawings before shaping his creations, Dominique is increasingly moving towards minimal gestures that exalt even more the beauty of the materials and their history. By choosing precisely the one he will work with, he thus creates "opportunity pieces" that he therefore works in echo with the gestures and orders of marble work. "Upcycling used to be a daily occurrence in all areas," concludes the man who, rather than discussing his origins, prefers to call himself a citizen of the world. "When we made a dress, we made the sleeves of another model with the leftover fabric. It was just natural."
