2022 Pinnacle Awards, Continued fom last month's issue of Slippery Rock Gazette
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Natural Stone Institute
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Kitchen/Bath
Volpe Residence Kitchen
Bluffton, South Carolina
This spectacular Palmetto Bluff home features natural stone throughout its grand interior. Adjacent to the Montage Palmetto Bluff Inn, this home will serve as a high-end luxury rental property for area visitors.
Prioritizing a beautiful aesthetic above all else, the client selected Mont Blanc quartzite throughout the home for the kitchen, wet bar, pantry, and one of the bathrooms. The client wanted to create a true “wow-factor” as visitors entered each room, especially the kitchen. The Mont Blanc quartzite is honed, not polished, and serves as a true statement stone.
Mont Blanc quartzite was installed on the island with a waterfall edge. The stone’s cool white background is accented with charcoal veining, which creates a sparkling and sophisticated presence throughout the kitchen.
The natural wood oven range hood and flooring, as well as the gray-toned cabinets, make the appearance of this Mont Blanc quartzite pop.
The stone continues across both the countertops and a full height backsplash over the oven wall. One unique feature of this project is that the full height quartzite backsplash went to the very top of the wall, not just to the top of the oven. Fabrication posed a particular challenge as the quartzite required cutting and installation around the existing kitchen windows.
StoneWorks’ teams intricately measured, cut, and fit the full height backsplash around the range hood all the way to the ceiling. Two book-matched slabs were required with a precise layout to match the veins on the center seam, as well as the waterfall mitered panels. StoneWorks also took great care to not chip those very brittle mitered edges when they transported the stone to the jobsite. The end results are truly stunning.
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Natural Stone Institute
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Residential Interior/Exterior Single Family
Inspiration Home
Homewood, Alabama
This 4,200 square foot custom build was designed with a European feel to fit into its historic neighborhood, with a cedar roof, copper gutters, and locally cut natural fieldstone to add to its charm. With outdoor views a priority, the kitchen was situated in front of a bank of windows. The kitchen rear wall is comprised of a large unobstructed bank of windows surrounded by a wall of Calacatta Macchia Vecchia honed marble from Italy. The same material is repeated with a waterfall effect on the island.
The owners’ suite continues the home’s European influence with marble slab fronts on the vanity and full marble slabs in the shower. The vanity consists of pure Statuario Altissimo honed marble on both countertops and drawer fronts. The deeply veined marble is repeated on shower walls with a hidden floor drain. There, a checkerboard floor, of 3˝x3˝ Imperial Danby honed marble tile from Vermont and Italian Galaxy Grey marble offers a contrasting classic pattern.
As the powder room is often considered the jewel box of the house, the dramatic vanity was designed from a slab of Agatona gem, a semi-precious Italian stone. For the butler’s pantry, inspiration from the dramatic onyx slab created an inviting niche with modern, glamorous appointments.
Keeping outdoor entertaining in mind, another pantry was situated near the outdoor living space. It does double duty as a laundry room, with the washer and dryer hidden behind casework and cabinets designed to conceal full size laundry baskets and beautiful black soapstone countertops. A covered patio with a large fireplace helps the owners take full advantage of their surroundings.
The full-service design/build firm was able to project and track cost and save clients time through preparation and excellent communication and ensured that every detail was thoughtfully crafted into a unique, timeless work of art.
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Natural Stone Institute
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Renovation/Restoration
Chase Tower Granite Cladding Repairs
Houston, Texas
Completed in 1981, the Barre Grey granite-clad skin of the Chase Tower needed attention. Located in downtown Houston, TX, at 1,002 feet tall, the 75-story building is the tallest building in Texas and noted as being the tallest “5-sided” building in the world. he scope of work was to address the stone cladding wind load anchors that were now also being subjected to gravity loads.
This work was to be completed with the building occupied and without removing the stone panels. A through-face anchor system was designed and engineered to meet the needs of the project.
The 15,610 stone panels on the building skin would require 46,626 anchors. In addition to the new anchors, it was necessary to ensure that all horizontal stone-to-stone and stone-to-window joints were “opened,” eliminating any transfer of deadload weight to the element below. This required the removal and replacement of 42,000 linear feet of sealant and the cutting of approximately 20,000 linear feet of stone to open the joints to a minimum joint width of ¼ inch.
Before mobilizing, an innovative off site training program for all personnel was completed at Camarata Masonry’s main office. Numerous workstations were built that simulated the building façade—the concrete substrate, cavity, and granite cladding. The work areas were even restricted to reflect the same constraints as would be encountered on the swing stages.
Because of the dangerous nature of the work, worker and public safety were paramount. Some of the actions taken to address safety included sidewalk overhead protection designed and built to remain in place for the entire 22-month duration, a detailed swing stage plan developed to provide enhanced worker safety, and wind protocols established to determine at what elevations and stages was it safe to work, or if it was safe to work at all.
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Natural Stone Institute
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Renovation/Restoration
Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes
Spokane, Washington
The Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes has graced downtown Spokane, Washington for well over a century. The church features Romanesque Revival architecture in ornate Carrara marble embellished with a variety of other stones. It includes an impressive back altar, pulpit, and bishop’s chair of the high liturgical craftsmanship typical of the era, sculpted and installed by Italian stoneworkers.
Poor remodeling left this once magnificent Cathedral a victim of changing styles over the decades.
The church’s new leaders wanted to restore the Cathedral to its original grandeur but figured that level of craftsmanship did not exist locally and working with contractors in Italy was beyond their comfort level.
A minor repair to a damaged fresco recently set an opportunity for the church to regain its former glory. Discovering the level of local stone fabrication had been more than capable all along, the church set a series of projects in motion, including a new altar, bishop’s chair, slab stairway, baptismal font, and various niches. Lastly, a shrine to Saint Peregrine was the pièce de résistance, completing the four-year project.
Slabs of Bianco Carrara and Grigio Carnico were cut in Italy as thick as 8 inches to achieve the carvings and columns.
Azul Bahia was placed as accents, complementing the magnificent European stained-glass windows for which the church is known. The project features solid turned columns, a complex domed roof in Grigio Carnico, and a baptismal font restoration and fabrication of an ornate statue niche out of Bianco Altissimo.
The fabrication features a perfect synergy of high technology, multi-axis machining coupled with the finesse of experienced hand sculpting and finishing. The result is a wealth of new work and restoration that blends seamlessly with the original architecture and style of the Cathedral while meeting the current needs of the modern church.
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Natural Stone Institute
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Commercial Exterior
Leonildo Pieropan Winery
Soave, Italy
Located in the hills a few steps from the walls of the medieval castle in Soave (Verona), Italy, this new winery is a dialogue between history and landscape; between contemporary forms, innovative technological solutions, and traditional materials.
Sustainability is the key word. To accomplish the project, an edge of the existing hill was increased by more than seven million cubic feet to hide the large volume necessary to the construction, letting the building fit perfectly within the environment and the surrounding landscape.
This simple concept required five years of work by the owners, the architect, and all those involved in the completion of this project, including the stone supplier.
The resulting structure of the winery develops mostly underground. It presents a single long and sinuous multi-faceted limestone façade, similar to the fascinating natural stone structures of the area and characterized by chiaroscuro effects. The trend of the jagged limestone front visually replaces an area of the pre-existing ground, wrapping the height diff erence between the new green roof, a raised strip of land, and the hill slope.
The material selected to create this long and sinuous multi-faceted limestone façade was Pietra di Vicenza stone with a brushed finish. Among the selection criteria were the material’s durability, availability, workability, color, and particularly the specific fossilization of this stone.
15,000 square feet of cladding (2,300 pieces of stone elements), distributed in faceted columns cut by CNC, were produced and pre-assembled in large sizes to create three-dimensional prism structures that suggest a coral reef emerging from the ground.
Pietra di Vicenza limestone acquires its key role as cladding and brings the project back to its ideal state of nature through its fossilized corals and shells of marine organisms that populated the seas forty million years ago, still visible in the stone.