Essential Art That Styles Living Spaces

Designers are experimenting with materials such as marble, brass and wood to create decor that isn't just practical but also has the aesthetics of art and a sense of fun

- Pooja Singh

Every few days, Priyanka Sharma and Dushyant Bansal, founders of design Studio Raw Material, go out seeking "white gold" in Rajasthan's Makrana. The city is famous for its bright, white marble. Sharma and Bansal, though, are more interested in picking the marble that has been discarded with just one idea in mind: turning the waste into beautiful objects of art and luxury.

This has been their focus since 2017, when they started the studio in Makrana, naming it for the raw material that surrounded them. "I come from a marble industry family," says Bansal, who graduated from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, in 2016 with a master's in interior design. "I know Makrana well; it's become a landscape of dumped marble." He and Sharma, who graduated from RCA in 2017 in ceramics, moved from Delhi to Makrana since they wanted to work with local artisans and study how people in the region used waste marble not as a luxury product but as an essential building material. "People here use mar ble waste to make shelters, tea stalls, benches. Why should only fine marble be seen as something luxurious, expensive and a highly finished material? Marble is dumped when it has blemishes, fissures and markings but it can also be useful and beautiful," says Bansal.

Over the years, Studio Raw Material, which counts luxury brand Dior among its regular clients and has showcased in London and New York, has made sculptural chairs, lamps and tables, combining irregular pieces of colourful marbles pieces like a Cubist collage with the help of artisans who have generational knowledge. A moss green table, for example, has been created using six discarded marble pieces joined to look like a cohesive design. Each piece, costing well over a lakh, is dependent on what is found in the dumpyard, making most creations one of a kind.