Two-Week, $1,000, 500-Square-Foot Rental Overhaul by a Design Student in Bushwick, Brooklyn in Remodelista recently reminded us of the beauty of the great possibilities inherent in rough cuts of marble and other stone.  The broken slab of marble propped behind their sink is a thing of surprising beauty. Kristina Line and Anton Bak foraged marble slab from a nearby stonemason. Says Bak,

…high-end manufacturers in Bushwick mainly focus on the big money jobs, which we figured out could benefit young designers like ourselves. They don’t see the beauty in the broken leftovers, or what in their eyes is trash.

Bak built a timber shelving system that he fitted with marble slabs.

…

Line and Lak built a marble shelf that rests partly on the windowsill and is supported by plumbing pipes.

The rough-ish marble, with its history write all over it reminded us of the furniture post-war textile D.D. and Leslie Tillett create for their home in Manhattan.

And interior decorator Paola Angoletta’s kitchen in a valley of the Veneto mountains…

We’ll take this wonderfully rough slab to make a bit table out of (found while browsing Verona Marble…

Of course, you could do any of this with other kinds of stone like slate and granite. Watch out for “fabricated” rough-edge stone that can look really uniform and worked, which it is, by chiseling the edge. We prefer the natural breaks.

Top four photographs Kristina Line and Anton Bak.