Stone Bathtubs

How a carved tub is made

A stone resin tub is poured into a mold, so every unit out of that mold is identical. These are the opposite. A block is selected, the inside is worked out of it and the outside is shaped, and the result has no seam anywhere on it because there is nothing joined.

The freestanding bathtub page covers the cast materials and how they compare on weight and heat retention. What separates this page is that there is no mold behind any of it.

The figure wraps around the form

This is the part that does not come across in a photograph. On a tile the veining sits on a flat plane. On a carved tub it runs over a curve, disappears around the outside and comes back on the inside, because the stone is continuous through the object.

Which means the block matters as much as the quarry. Two tubs in the same marble are two different objects, and the one being shipped is the one that was photographed, because there is no batch for it to come out of.

The stones this range is carved from

Calacatta Viola carries the purple and burgundy veining that makes it one of the rarer white marbles. Verde Antico is the deep green serpentine breccia. Alexandrette Black and Emperador Light are the dark stones, and Statuario, Carrara and Bianco are the quiet whites.

Travertine appears here as well, in a coffee brown and a silver beige, and it behaves differently as an object: the stone carries its own banding, so a travertine tub reads as layered where a marble one reads as veined. The marble tile page sets out what separates the stone names.

Polished against honed on a curve

Polished is first here with honed close behind, and on a tub the choice is not the same one it is on a floor. A polished curve returns light along its whole length, so the tub reads as a single object and the veining is at its strongest.

A honed surface gives back the stone where a polish gives back the light, and it is also what the hand and the shoulder meet. That tactile difference is the reason the honed group is as large as it is on a product nobody walks on.

A stone tub is sized in three dimensions

Every listing here carries a width, a length and a height, which is unusual on this site and follows from what the product is. A tile has two dimensions because it is a surface; a tub is an object and the third figure is what decides whether it fits under a window or through a door.

The lengths run from around five feet to nearly seven. The freestanding bathtub page works through how a tub length relates to the room it goes in.

Weight is the governing constraint

A solid stone tub weighs a multiple of a cast one before any water goes into it, because the wall of the tub is stone all the way through where a cast tub is a shell.

That puts the floor into the structural part of a project, ahead of the plumbing, and it is the first thing to establish on any of these. The freestanding bathtub page covers what that assessment involves across the materials.

Tub shapes and the one with a tray

Oval and ellipse forms carry most of the range, with rectangular and round pieces alongside them. The oval is the shape a carved block gives up most naturally, since it wastes the least stone.

A tray across the rim turns up in this range as well, cut from the block along with everything else. It is the kind of detail only carving allows: on a cast tub a tray is a separate part bonded on, and here it is the same piece of marble as the bath.