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If you care about building a Long Island home that’s a Zen retreat for your family, turn to natural stone. Wood comes close when it comes to the Zen elements. The Torii gates of Shinto Shrines are often constructed of wood. Yet, visit a Zen garden. A Zen garden celebrates ancient stones. A sea of carefully raked pebbles surround these sacred stones.
Zen is all about strength and flexibility. We know all about the strength of stone. Thus, let us talk about the flexibility of natural stone. Let us explore how natural stone can make your home the still point of the turning world.
Natural stone is as versatile as paint. You can ask us for samples of natural stone. You’ll keep them in your home much longer than those paint chips. We can make a color wheel out of natural stone because natural stone comes in all the colors of the rainbow and more. We’ve carved the Yin Yang symbol out of white marble and black onyx more than once.
Be polite to designers who warn clients that a certain stone treatment risks going out of fashion. After all, stone, due to its permanence, cannot change as style marches onward. These designers will tell you when to repaint the kitchen a different color. They know when it’s time to freshen up the window treatments.
Respectfully disagree about stone. We’re educating the design community. If a room of stone needs renewal after five years, we can recycle the stone. We’ll install stonework in a modular fashion. There’s an entire market in reclaimed stone. An ancient text, the I Ching, is called the book of changes. Even stonework follows the law of change.
Your former stone will go to a good home. Stone is the eternal building material. What is five years as a countertop to long-lasting stone? Zen is eternal. Natural stone is not eternal, but it lasts for eons under the right conditions.
Which Natural Stone is Right for You?
When we talk about the palette of natural stone, we talk about the varieties of natural stone. Consider marble, limestone transformed by great heat over time. Take a look at quartz, a stone that blends extreme hardness with the power to transmit light. Think of quartzite, the result of quartz sand transformed into a hard gemlike stone. Natural stone and Zen take many forms.
Natural stone is as versatile as wood. You can cut wood into any shape. You can mill wood into any feature. Stone doesn’t cut as easily as wood, but Mackson Marble has the equipment to handle stone as if it were wood. Challenge our technicians. We can deliver any shape in any size to meet the requirements of your designs. Our techs are the Zen monks of stone!
Now the luckiest wood in the world transforms, cell by cell over time, into petrified wood. Petrified wood makes a beautiful stone that maintains grain and growth rings. We keep it in stock for those who want to blend wood and stone for chairs and dining tables. Zen is about transformation.
Natural stone has qualities that can’t be found in most material. Most natural stone panels are waterproof. This makes it ideal for rooms dedicated to the pursuit of cleanliness. Consider marble for the locker room of your private gymnasium. It makes an ideal enclosure for a shower. Nothing makes a spa a peaceful retreat more than walls clad in marble.
Natural stone also stops sound. If you want to achieve peace and quiet in a personal library, invest in walls of natural stone. We can craft shelves out of a block of granite or quartz if you want the sturdiest shelves known to man. The library will be as quiet as a Zen monastery.
Natural stone offers patterns that cannot be easily recreated in any building material. Consider Venetian Gold marble. When one gazes at Venetian Gold marble with veins and colored grains, one almost goes into a trance. Natural stone patterns are the mandalas of nature. Ammonites, creatures of the ancient seas trapped in stone, are like visual labyrinths.
Natural stone shares qualities with glass. Like glass, natural stone can be polished to a smooth surface. Like glass, natural stone can transmit light. It’s possible to awaken a shape in natural stone with illumination from within. Quartz, quartzite, onyx and geodes all glow mysteriously when touched by illumination. Light awakens the Zen nature of natural stone.
Natural stone responds to temperature. Stone retains warmth. Imagine natural stone on the floor of your sunroom on a winter’s day. The stone will absorb the heat from low winter sun at noontime. The Zen hermits of the desert survive the night, thanks to heat retained by natural stone.
Natural stone can be chilled, which makes it fabulous for a bar countertop, indoor or outdoor. Take a design note. Make sure the drinks on the marble panel remain cold, but don’t frost the people enjoying the drinks!
Yin force is the expanding power of nature. Yang force is the contracting power of nature. When natural stone warms, it expands. When natural stone grows cold, it contracts. What can be more Zen than stone, which responds to Yin and Yang forces?
Come contemplate the Zen of natural stone by walking around our indoor showrooms with your design team. We promise no chanting salespeople.
