Dornbracht Atelier and Fabian Freytag: a tap built from amethyst and marble

Most taps are designed to disappear. This one is designed to be looked at. Together with Dornbracht Atelier, the architect Fabian Freytag has turned a tap into a small piece of sculpture, assembled from stones that are more often set in jewellery than in a wash basin.

Freytag, who was born in Hamburg, is known for work of theatrical extravagance: strong colour, unusual combinations of material, classic beauty handled with a spirit of experiment and lightness. For this piece he worked with Dornbracht, the fittings manufacturer from Iserlohn, and with its Atelier, which realises made-to-measure designs from a single piece upwards.

Houses on a hillside

The idea began with a journey. Freytag names a trip to the Canary Islands as the main inspiration, and in particular the way the colourful, Mediterranean architecture there climbs the hills, house stacked on house in rich colours and shapes. That stacking is legible in the finished object, which reads less like a single casting than like a small town built of stone.

Stone by stone

A strongly curved spout rises from a cube of rhodochrosite, a pink natural stone. Its earthy red powder coating takes up the colour of the stone, while the glossy finish gives the spout a powerful presence and sets it deliberately apart from the natural and precious stones around it.

The handles combine several geometries in stone. On the left sits a cylinder of Rosso Alicante, a reddish marble, arranged with green and black marble. On the right, a sphere of amethyst rests on a base of blue quartz and a narrow plinth of Crema Valencia, a beige natural stone. Dornbracht also lists opal among the exclusive materials of the composition.

Made by hand in two workshops

The piece was made by hand at the Dornbracht works in Iserlohn. The stones were worked by Pauly Carvings, a gemstone jewellery workshop in Idar-Oberstein. The result is described by the manufacturer as an expressive interplay of craft, art and function, and it is hard to argue with the description.

For Dornbracht, the project is also a demonstration of what the Atelier is for. Because designs can be produced from a single piece, architects and designers get the freedom to express their own style and to draw fittings that exist only once. Freytag used that freedom without hesitation.

At a glance

What it says about a room

A tap is one of the few objects in a house that is touched every day, and one of the few still chosen from a catalogue in an afternoon. Freytag's piece makes the opposite case: that a fitting can carry the colour of a room, and can be as considered as anything that hangs on its walls.