Marble Sinks

Polished inside, worked outside

Polished is the finish on most of this range, and behind it sit combinations that exist nowhere else in the catalog: polished with a hand split face, polished and combed, polished and rough.

Those describe one object finished two ways. The bowl is brought to a polish, and the exterior is left split from the block, chiselled into parallel grooves, or simply worked and left rough. The stone shows what it is on the outside and behaves itself on the inside.

Carved from one block

These are not assembled. A block of marble is hollowed out until a bowl is left inside it, which means the figure in the stone runs continuously over the outside and down into the basin with no seam anywhere.

It is also why no two are alike. The block decides the veining, and a block is a unique object. Sinks covers the full range including the fabricated metal and composite half.

The pedestals are one piece too

Look at the size fields and some of them carry a height of thirty three or thirty six inches, which is not a bowl dimension.

Those are freestanding basins: a column and a bowl carved out of a single block, standing on the floor with no vanity under them. They are the most demanding thing a stone carver makes at this scale and they are the reason the size notation on this page is so varied.

How the sizes are written

A vessel gives a diameter and a height, written with a D and an H. A rectangular basin gives a width, a length and a height. A pedestal gives all three with the height running to the floor.

Three different notations on one page, and reading one as another is the commonest mistake here. The figure that matters for a vessel is how much counter the bowl covers and how far it stands above it.

The colors, and the ones that surprise

White leads, then black, white and gray together, plain gray and a group described as white, gray and purple, with beiges, greens and a red among the rest.

The named stones behind them are Calacatta, Carrara, a Rosso and a set of Turkish marbles. That purple is a real marble color: it comes from manganese and iron together in a pale stone, and it appears in basins far more often than in tile because a single block can carry it where a whole floor could not.

Wall hung and the pieces that have no counter

A group here is described as wall mounted, which removes the counter from the arrangement entirely and leaves the basin fixed to the wall with nothing under it.

In a small cloakroom that is often the only way a stone basin fits at all, since a vanity needs floor area a stone basin does not. It also puts the whole weight of a carved block onto a wall, which is a structural question rather than a decorative one and belongs with whoever is building the room.

The vendor behind most of this page

Almost all of this range comes from one workshop, which is unusual in this catalog and worth knowing.

Carved stone basins are not a product line a large factory runs; they are made by workshops with people who carve stone. That is why the finish descriptions here are so specific and so varied, and why terms like combed and hand split face appear at all: they describe what a particular pair of hands did to a particular block.

Marble, and what a bathroom does to it

Marble is a calcite carbonate, and a household acid dulls the spot it touches. In a bathroom the likely sources are the products people keep on a counter.

A honed basin carries that outcome better than a polished one, since a change in reflectance shows least where there was no reflection. Against that, a polished bowl is what most people want a marble sink to look like. Marble tile carries the chemistry in full.

Where a marble sink goes

A bathroom vanity, a powder room, a cloakroom, a wall-hung installation and a freestanding position in a large bathroom where the basin is meant to be furniture.

Stone bathtubs are the same process at a larger scale, and bathroom faucets carries the spout heights a vessel needs.