Stone Forest in business 20 years
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7/5/2009 - 7/5/09
Rustic, rough-textured sphere fountains, garden benches, and Japanese-style stone lanterns. Elegant pedestal sinks and basins in granite, onyx, marble, or sandstone. Tall, glistening fountains in hard-edged, contemporary forms. A fabulously shaped bathtub of carrara marble. A modernistic, modular sink/countertop system featuring stainless-steel fixtures and beautiful, flat sinks of honed black granite.
To wander around the Stone Forest garden gallery or peruse the Santa Fe business' catalog or Web site is a kind of paradise, if you like stone and good design.
Owner Mike Zimber is celebrating the 20th birthday of Stone Forest in 2009.
"I originally started making Japanese stone lanterns and basins for Japanese-American gardens," he said during a talk at the company office on St. Francis Drive. The adobe building began life as a dairy in the early 20th century, then it was a residence. Now, appropriately, it boasts stone-framed doorways.
"In 1989, I began designing fountains, at first simple things like a stone sphere with a hole, and they gradually got more contemporary."
Every sculptural piece offered for sale at Stone Forest, every granite birdbath and monolithic contemporary fountain, was carved from a single block of natural stone using a hammer and chisels. The granites, basalts, and other varieties of stone are the finest available and will last for generations. More important, each piece has its own character by virtue of the material and its carver.
Nor is stone the sole material in use by the company's artisans.
"Our business is really a combination of stone, wood, iron, and bronze," Zimber said. "We have our workshop in southeast China where we rough things out. Some of the work we do from start to finish here, but our formula has always been to rough out overseas and finish here.
"Our main business today is kitchens and bathrooms, so we're doing a lot of basins and pedestal sinks and bathtubs — well, we were selling some bathtubs. Everything's down from a year ago.
"We're mainly a wholesaler to high-end kitchen and bath showrooms and garden centers, but we love this space. People do buy here, but it's only about 10 percent of our business."
Recent additions to the Stone Forest line are fire vessels and, in collaboration with artist Tom Joyce, some solar lighting pieces.
"We also still do some designs from 20 years ago," Zimber said. "One of our unifying themes is that we work with all natural materials. The other is less is more: we want to emphasize the underlying natural materials over the design.
