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An extraordinary installation for the Big Apple
A two-level apartment of over 350 sqm is located within a building on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park in New York.
The residence was completely renovated in 2012, combining two apartments on different floors into a single larger and more spacious one in the classic style typical for apartments intended for New York’s upper middle class.
The project is signed by BW Architects of New York, a firm that bases its design philosophy on respect for the history of buildings, creating cutting-edge environments designed to last over time.
The choice of travertine
In this type of apartment, the choice of high-quality Italian marbles is an essential must: the architects’ requests mainly concerned Carrara marble in the Calacatta selection, with a polished finish.
We at Pietre di Rapolano provided the Calacatta slabs, which were then processed in the United States, and supplied the entrance medallion, the kitchen mosaics, and the countertops.
The material request was clear: the Calacatta marble had to be beautiful. Starting from the blocks that were inspected by the architect and the client directly in Carrara, we cut and supplied the slabs.
The most interesting part of the work was the creation of the entrance medallion.
This, as seen from the drawings and photos of the realization, consists of a complex geometry based on circle radii of variable sizes that determine a design, where the various alternating colored pieces are each different from the other, eventually recomposing into a final uniqueness.
In this instance, we were asked to provide the various pieces cut by water jet (a cutting system based on a thin high-pressure water jet, controlled by a computer): the complexity was not so much in the cutting, but in the subsequent installation of the various pieces.
By studying the geometry of the design, we managed to identify a module that, when repeated in sequence, easily reconstituted the entire design (see tables 0 and 2). Each module was preassembled in Italy, gluing the various pieces onto a shaped marble slab: the various modules – 10 in total – were subsequently easily installed.
This was our contribution to the project: a potentially very complex installation made easy and quick.
