Is Plain Old Carrara Marble Making a Comeback? Designers Say Yes
In a Venice apartment designed by Jacques Grange, the primary bathroom is a cocoon of Cremo Tirreno marble.
Colorful marble has been having a moment. Designers and homeowners have rediscovered rosy Rojo Alicante, emerald-hued Empress Green, and purple-tinged Calacatta Viola. But make no mistake: Black-and-white stone hasn’t gone anywhere.
Treasured since ancient times when they were quarried for everything from the Roman Forum to the mosaic floors in Pompeii, stones in basic black and basic white still hold immense, enduring appeal.
“Today, we’re seeing these wild, hyper-veined colors used for big, splashy moments, but black and white is endlessly captivating, and it can be big and bold too,” says Lyndsey Belle Tyler, the creative director of ABC Stone in New York City. “Even in ancient Greece, we saw bold geometric patterns created from black-and-white stone tiles.”
It simply doesn’t get any more high contrast than black-and-white stone used together. “Literally, white is the absence of all color, and black is the presence of all color,” Tyler says. “So together you get something powerful.” That’s a fact that has been harnessed throughout time, from the first architects of antiquity to contemporary designers who continue to find inventive new expressions for the material.
“You have the black-and-white checkerboard floor, which has been around forever and is a classic staple, but we’ve taken that concept and transformed it with a much more contemporary aesthetic,” says Claudia Afshar, a Los Angeles–based interior designer who recently remixed the arrangement by using two different sizes of rectangles made from Mercury black and Oriental white marble to create a statement-making floor for a client’s bathroom. “It’s still a timeless look, but it’s much more interesting.”
Natural stone has, of course, inspired newer engineered solid surface materials too. Afshar designed the textured Ukiyo collection for Cosentino in just five colors last fall, including the deep-charcoal, soapstone-like Bromo and the Calacatta-white-inspired Rem.
Cambria’s executive vice president of design, Summer Kath, says black, white, and dramatic quartz slabs that mix those hues together—such as Bentley, which features a white background with undulating black lines—are perennial winners. “Think of those colors in fashion,” Kath says. “They just never go out of style. You always have that little black dress because you can accessorize it up or down and make it look casual or formal. You can think of a kitchen in the same way.”
That point isn’t lost on the New York–based architect Morris Adjmi. “Black and white is recentering, and all other colors look good against one or the other or both together,” he says. In recent projects, Adjmi has designed bathrooms with hefty white marble vanities mounted against black-tiled walls, and corridors with white-marble mosaic floors bordered by patterns rendered in black marble. But he also embraces other colors that naturally occur in these types of stone—especially gray in all its variations.
“White can be a little gray, and black can be a little brown” when the stone comes out of the ground, he notes, so he frequently picks up on those colors in other elements in a space, such as wood millwork or concrete floors that get stained a similar hue. “It still looks classic, but intro-ducing that in-between color can also help it feel a little fresher,” he says.
Whichever way you decide to use black and white—to create a traditional interior that feels as formal as a tuxedo, to realize a starkly modernist abode, or to build a relaxed, welcoming space that promises to only get better with age—the combo will never look dated because it taps into something more fundamental than any trend or style. “It’s good and evil, chiaroscuro,” Adjmi says. “It represents all the essential attributes of our being.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
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