Stone Age Rock-Solid Building Material Exudes A Feeling Of Permanence

Tom Riley wrestles rock for a living. Heavy slabs of quartzite, to be exact.

Like a rodeo cowboy scrutinizing a bull, he sizes up mounds of gray raw material blasted from a quarry and hauled 20 miles down unforgiving mountain roads.

With one gloved hand he pivots flat chunks weighing as much as 200 pounds. Choosing a promising specimen, Riley braces himself, heaves with all his might and tilts the rock up until it balances on end.

Then he straddles the slab, pinning it between his good leg and the prosthetic one he’s worn since a motorcycle accident in 1987.

Working with a 2-inch-wide chisel in his left hand and a 4-pound mallet in his right, Riley hammers away, opening natural fissures that had remained sealed for millions of years.

Fractured layers reveal a treasure of subtle colors — blues, browns, golds, tans.

The split quartzite is sorted according to thickness and color, assigned a name — soft blue is nicknamed “Charmin blue” — and then stacked on 2-ton pallets for eventual shipment to dealers and homeowners.

In this era of high-speed Internet access, halogen ovens and digital surround sound, there’s something reassuringly simple and permanent about stone.

That’s why Seattle architect Tom Kundig routinely incorporates it into the homes he designs for well-heeled customers.

“My clients aren’t building houses to last 20 years,” says Kundig, the son of distinguished Spokane architect Moritz Kundig. “They’re building a legacy that people will enjoy for 50 or 100 years.”

Stone’s permanence enhances the legacy. A new home Kundig designed for a Spokane Valley couple has close to 100 tons of quartzite from Kootenay Stone Centre, where Riley works.

Among the home’s dramatic details are a 14-foot-long slab shelf in the dining room and a three-story stone wall with a “Juliet balcony” in the foyer.

There’s also a stone countertop that thrusts through a powder-room wall to become a shelf in the first-floor hallway. “The idea,” explains Kundig, “is that everything makes way for stone. The finish material yields to the harder, cruder, heavier material.

“In successful architecture,” he says, “you’re always balancing opposites: dark and light spaces; rough and smooth textures; light and heavy materials. The result is greater overall richness.”

Iris Lamb, owner of Kootenay Stone Centre 115 miles north of Spokane, has preached the merits of stone for almost three decades. What started out as a weekend hobby gradually escalated into a full-time business with quarries, heavy equipment, a handful of employees and an entertaining Web site (www.netidea.com/ksc/).

What’s most amazing is not that she survived in a brutally cyclical business, but that she survived, period.

Back in the early days, Lamb didn’t want to leave dynamite — a basic tool of the quarry trade — lying around where someone might steal it. “So I kept it under my bed.”

The first time she had to blast alone, Lamb recalls, she was so nervous that she sat in the cab of her truck “crying my heart out, eh.” Eventually she got up the nerve to set and trigger a charge, but not before writing a goodbye letter to her family and friends “just in case something went wrong.”

The late 1970s brought a building boom that allowed Lamb to hire 20 employees. But rising interest rates a few years later crippled her business, “and it’s never really recovered,” she says.

Even so, Lamb — a born-again Christian so evangelical that she hosts annual revivals and keeps a television in her horse’s stall tuned to the Trinity Broadcasting Network — is optimistic that economic salvation is just around the corner.

Two factors are on her side, she figures:

First, there’s the favorable currency exchange rate. Lamb insists U.S. customers can buy her quartzite for less than what local dealers charge. And Americans aren’t required to pay sales tax or import duty on Canadian stone purchased for their own use.

The other reason for Lamb’s optimism is what she perceives as growing eagerness among designers to use thick quartzite slabs as shelves, ledges and countertops. The less the stone has to be worked, the greater the potential profit. Also, buyers seem willing to pay top dollar for stone used in more conspicuous applications, such as countertops.

“When I used to sell slabs cheap, they just sat here,” recalls Lamb. “Now, the more I raise the price, the more people seem to want them.”

Craig Boris, president of American Masonry Supply in Spokane, agrees with Lamb that natural stone’s popularity is on the rise.

“Quartzite is a very good product for this climate because it’s so hard,” says Boris. “We freeze and thaw so many times over the winter, our area can be very tough on stone — sandstone, in particular. Quarzite is one of the hardest stones available. It’s harder than granite.”

Boris doesn’t buy much Canadian quartzite, preferring to deal with suppliers in southern Idaho and Utah.

Canadian pallets usually arrive wrapped in plastic, he says, “so customers can’t see if there’s consistent color and thickness from top to bottom.”

Also, Boris sticks with large-volume dealers. That way, there’s less risk of running out of a particular stone midway through a big project.

American Masonry Supply sells a variety of products, including stone look-alikes made of light-weight cement and frequently seen in higher-end spec homes.

Synthetic stone costs about the same as the real thing, but it goes up more easily, so it is cheaper to install. “Personally I prefer natural stone,” says Boris, “and most people who have the money go with natural stone.”

Architect Kundig agrees.

“Real stone has a certain sensibility about it,” says Kundig. “It has a spirit and depth of color that synthetic stone doesn’t.”

Even from a distance, real stone walls display a sense of structure. “A mason over here refers to stones as sleeping,” says Kundig. “There’s a restfulness to a well-laid wall, because the top stones are actually resting on the stones beneath.

“With a synthetic stone wall,” Kundig says, “you don’t see that same sense of structure. Synthetic stones are so light, you can glue them anywhere. You could glue them to a car.”

Kundig recommends people avoid using stone simply as a veneer or decorative material. Stone works best as a centerpiece or structural element, such as a chimney or a container for stairs. “That’s when it takes on special meaning,” he says. “It defines a room.”

American Masonry’s Boris suggests people shop around to compare prices and products. If you buy by the pallet, make sure the stone is consistent, with no pieces smaller than a square foot.

And don’t be dissuaded by stone’s pricey reputation. “Natural stepping stone actually costs less per square foot than a lot of these manufactured concrete products,” says Boris.

Lamb, who teaches a one-day course in stone masonry, tells her students, “The most important thing is not to be afraid of stone.

“Stone is very forgiving. That’s why I get along so well with it.”