One of my favorite weeknight activities is eating a weed gummy and scrolling through high-res images of beautiful quartz and marble on the website of local building-materials vendor New York Stone. That’s how I noticed, while watching model Paloma Elsesser’s Architectural Digest house tour, that her incredible bathroom is fitted out in tons of Rosso Francia, a.k.a Languedoc marble. It’s the bright red of a high-nitrate pork product, flecked with white like the beads of fat in a well-mixed salami. (In the Middle Ages, a Benedictine monk described the stone’s appearance as “foam and mixed blood.”) The marble comes from France, and you can find it all over Versailles. But I’ve recently been noticing it in trendy spaces in New York — in addition to Elsesser’s Brooklyn brownstone, it’s used on the countertops at Quarters, the lush home-goods showroom from lighting brand In Common With.
It’s not limited to Rosso Francia — restaurant tables at Printemps are made of another French marble, and I’ve seen a slew of red-marble home products on the market. (CB2 has been early to the trend.) I find this endlessly fun. These items feel fancy, but their unmistakable resemblance to Italian cured meats adds a certain je ne sais quoi. You wonder if Marie Antoinette also thought her mantelpiece looked like prosciutto. And although adding red-marble countertops to your bathroom or kitchen may be prohibitively expensive, I’ve found a few other ways to bring the trend into your home.
Right now, the easiest place to find red-marble houseware is CB2; I love its red-travertine side table and skinny I-beam side table.
For a minimalist silhouette, try the Delicious tray from Blu Dot. (The veining on this one reminds me of caul fat.)
A very giftable red-terrazzo cake stand from a Puglian stone company.
Rosso Francia marble is expensive; if you absolutely need to get your hands on some, may I recommend these mosaic tiles? Just keep them away from a charcuterie board or someone will break a tooth.
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