Stone is not Fashion

The other day I visited an acquaintance’s house. In their drawing room, I noticed a wall fully covered with shiny glossy marble. Looked Italian to me. I guess it wasn’t back-lit, may be in the evenings it could be.

In my conversations with Dad, I often remark, “It has become a fashion market” and its variations.

Even as I write, I am meditating on the meaning of ‘It’ in the above remark.

What is ‘It’?

It = The entire category of Stone Industry?

That doesn’t sound and feel right. And yet, house-design does follow certain styles, fads and fashion, and making choices related to stone is a part of the designing process. So it may not be wrong to call it fashion.

Typically fashion has been linked to garments and clothing. In which other areas, do we see ‘fashion’? Cars? Automobiles in general. Furniture design, typically sofas and beds. I see that in ceiling-design too.

Coming back to stone, well it can’t be fashion. Stone, unless crushed, has a timeless sort of, almost an unchanging presence and look.

Think about it. Garments, one changes almost every day or every other day; some folks do have an unchanging look and they have multiples of the same garments to keep that unchanging look.

You can’t change stone. I mean, theoretically you can but in terms of possibilities and probabilities, you don’t. Stone changes its hues ever so slowly, but that’s that. Nothing radical.

And yet, since stone (I include marble and granite also in stone for the purpose of this post) appears in different colors, it does lend itself to some sort of fashion.

At some point, white marble was a craze. Some time back grey granite and stone was in greater demand. For a couple of years and continuing, brown granite and stone looks to be more popular.

Just as a wardrobe tends towards a palette, colors in the house would tend towards a palette too if you observe and make notes carefully. It would be worthwhile to think in terms of color palettes for your house or interior design and then look at colors of individual elements like sofa color, wall color, floor color et al.