Semi-precious materials have long been harnessed in interiors, to often extraordinary effect. The fabled (and lost) early 18th-century Amber Room, initially installed in the Berlin City Palace, was described as a wondrous honey-hued chamber akin to a real-life Aladdin’s cave. There was an early 19th-century Malachite Room at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg; the striking stone, known as the Tsars’ ‘green gold’, was employed for fireplaces, tables, urns, vases and diplomatic gifts, of which Napoleon received so many that he conceived a twinning Malachite Room at Versailles.
Less specialist-seeming is marble, which has adorned bathrooms and more since the time of Ancient Rome; today, “every kitchen should have some marble. It instantly adds a sense of glamour,” says Martin Brudnizki. There’s a romantic grandeur to semi-precious, too, and looking at pictures of those palaces can provide a natural segue to thinking that, probably, every interior should have some lapis lazuli, onyx, or amethyst, as well. “Jewel colours have a fabulous ability to uplift and invite at all times of year,” points out Flora Soames, as if in encouragement. There are also, allegedly, spiritual benefits. Malachite stands for positivity and change, while tortoiseshell is meant to bring luck and protection from ghosts (useful information for those among us who suffer home hauntings.)
And yet, when watching Ali Abbasi’s latest film, The Apprentice, which charts former US President and President-elect Donald Trump’s early years as a budding real estate tycoon, who didn’t shudder slightly at the excess of Ivana’s importation of “an entire mountain” of rose-pink marble for the Trump Tower foyer? For while the beauty of semi-precious materials is undeniable, that beauty can come with drawbacks. The carbon footprint of Ivana’s 240 tonnes of Breccia Pernice, once memorably expressed as a quantity that would have made even Liberace blush, will have been colossal. Then there’s the knottiness of dealing with non-renewable resources – we’re unlikely to run out of marble any time soon, but it is apparently becoming increasingly hard to find good quality lapis lazuli. Moving on, tortoiseshell has traditionally only been used for smaller items such as inlaid boxes and frames, or for intricate marquetry on furniture, but even so, it comes from sea turtles who, compassion aside, are critically endangered.
Finally, there’s the price: the Russian government orchestrated a reconstruction of the Amber Room, complete with six tonnes of amber mounted on gold leaf and embellished with carving, further gilding, mirrors, classical swags, and gemstones – but it cost US$11 million, which doesn’t exactly chime with the cost-of-living crisis.
