How salt interiors became the flavor of the month

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As a child, Isaac Monté spent hours in his grandmother’s damp hillside basement in Zottegem, Belgium, captivated by the stalactites growing on the ceiling. “I would watch little droplets of water fall from their tips and wonder how long it would take them to grow to the ground,” he says. His fascination never left him. Now, trained as an architect and product designer, he grows salt crystals in giant stainless steel tanks in his low-ceilinged studio in Rotterdam, his walls dotted with formations and his hands stained red from the oxides he uses to color his work. . .

One of his latest pieces, which he shows at a design fair PAD London this month (10-15 October), It is a bulbous pink glass vase with delicate magenta ribbons running through it, like sticks of rock. Another is a bright, coiled pendant lamp. “Each piece is unique; forming differently and reflecting light in such a beautiful way,” she says. Ariane de Rothschild agrees; Group CEO Edmond de Rothschild recently purchased a vase (pieces available from £4,000 at Noble Space).

mountain He is not the only artist at the fair who exhibits works in salt. “For the first time this year, we are seeing a strong presence of designers and artists using salt to make furniture and sculptures,” says Patrick Perrin, president and founder of PAD. In addition to being valued for its aesthetic appeal, salt is also used “to encourage the public to see its value and potential.”

Salt was once a precious commodity. There is evidence of Eneolithic salt shakers. The word salary comes from “salarium” (salt) with which Roman soldiers were often paid instead of money. As early as 6000 BC, wars were fought for control of the Yuncheng Salt Lake in China’s Shanxi Province. And in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi protested against the salt tax imposed by Great Britain on India, boosting the independence movement.

french designer Roxane Lahidji He uses salt in many of his creations: “Now we have freezers; Global warming means we use less salt to de-ice roads; and rising sea levels mean salt is becoming more abundant.” His work with the design research program. Atelier Luma has been finding “different design applications for it.” Lahidji makes sculptural furniture including milky white marble side tables, consoles and end tables (from £4,500 from 88 Gallery), using salt extracted from the marshes of the Rhône delta. “It has strong parallels with marble,” he says, adding: “The fact that it took something fluid from the sea and transformed it into something solid and rock-like, I find quite poetic.”

The crystals seemed to know where to grow and heal the piece.

The alchemical process of turning salt into art is a closely guarded secret, including the precise recipe for the saline solution, which can take years to perfect. During development, Monté’s studio was covered from floor to ceiling with Post-it notes with different temperatures and volumes of minerals. Both he and the Berlin designer Lukas Wegwerth (furniture from £12,000 in Fumi Gallery) implement a process that, broadly speaking, suspends an object in a heated saline solution, gradually cooling the tank over a week to form crystals. The object is immersed again and cooled to create new layers. It is a slow and uncertain process: each piece can take weeks to develop and may not always emerge as the artist imagines. “I’ve abandoned pieces after working on them for weeks,” Wegerth says. For Monté, that’s half the point: “Hopefully these objects will make people realize that the rate at which we mass produce items is unsustainable.”

Lahidji has a different method. It uses a saline solution mixed with tree resin, allowing it to press parts into molds. Spherical pendant lights have become a rich couture. “You can invent almost anything,” he says.

And here you can do it: take the example of Israeli designer Erez Nevi Pana. Crystalline sculptural tables and stools or Utrecht-based workshop Mark SturkenboomOvergrown series of chandeliers and chandeliers. Architects have chosen the material, including Frank Gehry, who commissioned salt panels to clad the interior sections. Tower in Arles, inaugurated in 2021 (also Atelier Luma project), while Mále Uribe Forés used salt tiles for a 2020 project, salt imaginaries.

While Monté became interested in crystals to explore ideas around the concept of time, Wegwerth came to light through a conversation with the Japanese sculptor Yoshimi Hashimoto about the notion of kintsugi, or gilded carpentry. When he suspended a much-loved but broken teapot in a saline solution, he saw crystals forming along the fault lines. “It was fascinating,” she says, “as if the crystals had intelligence about where to grow and heal the piece.” Collectors now come to him with found and broken objects, including curator Alice Stori Liechtenstein, who asked Wegwerth to work with damaged antique Meissen porcelain that he found in the attic of his castle in Austria.

It’s the ultimate transformation story: taking something ordinary and turning it into a shiny prize. Monté concludes: “By creating gallery objects, I feel like I am putting the material back on its pedestal.”