Unveiling Roxane Lahidji’s Careful Mediation of Nature, Materiality, and Beauty in her “Marbled Salts” Series

Taking a material abundant in nature and whose beauty is easily overlooked, the Zaventem-based designer Roxane Lahidji develops objects that resemble luxurious stone but in reality are made from salt. “Marbled Salts” is the French designer’s ongoing series of pieces which champion material experimentation to achieve timeless yet sustainable everyday furniture.

View all pieces by Roxane Lahidji, including the “Marbled Salts” Tako Tsubo Dining Table >

Historically, salt has been a rare and costly material but with the dawn of the industrial revolution, its price dropped to the point that it was no longer seen as a valuable resource. Lahidji, however, saw potential in this material and started to experiment with its unique physical properties. Given its self-binding abilities, the designer employs tree resin to give it both shape and strength as well as coal powder to create natural colour variations. The resulting vein pattern bestows the final object with an aesthetic that simulates the look of expensive natural stone.

At the heart of this process, is Lahidji’s two-fold mission: to produce objects that question our notion of beauty and that simultaneously do not harm the environment. “The most important thing for me to communicate through my work [is] to question its subjectivity,“ Lahidji explains The Design Edit. “Yes, of course, I want people to find them beautiful, but I also want to make them in such a way that they’re asking themselves what it’s made from, because it’s probably something that they never saw before, and when they know what it’s made from, how it is made, to question why they found it beautiful in the first place.”

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By reinventing salt, Lahidji also created a sustainable means of production. For her consciousness, she only wants to produce furniture that can be discarded without polluting the environment. Every piece of “Marbled Salts” can become one with nature again if its owner decides so. This innovative process earned Lahidji several awards. Both in 2019 and 2010, she was awarded among the 100 best French international designers with the FD100 price and also won the 2019 Bolia Award.

Explore the “Marbled Salts” series by Roxane Lahidji through ADORNO’s curated selection of her work. Visit her showroom and browse her objects >

BIO

Roxane Lahidji is a designer and artist specialising in material development and applications. Her research focuses on conciliating sculptural productions with sustainability.

Lahidji was born in Paris in 1992 and grew up in the French capital before studying illustration and product design in Strasbourg (HEAR). After graduating from the Social Design department of Design Academy Eindhoven in 2017, Lahidji developed her project “Marbled Salts”.