Managing a custom project: The William Vale case with our “rigel” marble feature wall

The William Vale was the first project we realized in collaboration with Studio Munge, an award-winning interior design firm located in Toronto. I couldn’t even imagine that I was working on an important job such as a marble feature wall in The William Vale hotel in Brooklyn, New York!

Indeed, at first, what I knew about this realization was the address of the building where Lithos Design products would have been installed. I did some researches on the web and found out it was going to be a hospitality project.

For this stunning project, the designers’ concept was to create a marble feature wall of great impact, having carved stone tiles that run on all the four sides of the 15 ft tall wall in the living room.

The product the designers felt perfect for this space was “rigel“, which is part of our “Pietre Luminose” collection. It features 3d stone tiles engraved on the surface, realized in translucent materials, which are backlit.
The standard product is made of marble tiles cm 60x60x2 and metallic boxes which contain led light box. The tiles are usually produced with special grooves so that they can be installed on the standard metallic boxes and create in this way the backlit effect.
The designers’ concept was to have the “rigel” pattern showed in its total natural beauty without the effect of the light passing through the material, and the pattern was supposed to be perfectly centred on the frontal and rear elevations.

Together with our internal technical department, I started to work in this direction. The first thing to do was to check the possibility to modify the production process of the “rigel” so that it had no grooves but a flat back surface, that allowed the installation using glue. We made some tests and the result was positive: the “rigel” tiles could be produced with no grooves.
Once it was confirmed that it was possible to do so, we started to think about the layout of the tiles: in order to match the exact dimensions of the wall, we created cut-to-size tiles and we could center the pattern on the frontal and rear surfaces. On the two sides Studio Munge chose to have the same material as of the textured tiles – that is Carrara Ghiaccio – with flat surface and the same finishing as the Rigel tiles.

Further than this, we were requested to create quirk mitered edges on all the four angles where the “rigel” meets with the flat tiles and to have all the tiles – textured and flat – with the same height so that the joints are perfectly aligned along all the perimeter of the wall.

The William Vale project was challenging and I’m very pleased I have had the chance to work on such an amazing task!
I could check the versatility of our products once again and I can say that almost nothing is impossible for a team like ours, where the clients’ requests always come first and there is a strong will to raise continuously the bar of our know-how.

Only at a later stage I learnt all the details about this project: it was the amazing and luxurious Vale Garden Residence, the largest and most magnificent suite of the entire hotel, with extraordinary panoramic views of New York City!
It was exciting to be able to meet all the designers’ technical requests and needs. I hope there are more projects to realize in collaboration with Studio Munge to come!