Equinox Chestnut Hill

The brief

Equinox's club at The Street in Chestnut Hill opens with a two-story lobby built around one sweeping stair. The design called for the stair and the walls beside it to read as a single piece of stone: the treads curving up, the wall curving with them, and a fine ridged texture running across the whole surface, with the Equinox name set into it.

What we supplied

The curved stair treads and risers, the curved and ribbed wall cladding that follows the stair all the way around, the stone reception desk and the dark stone floors through the lobby.

How it came together

None of it could be made from tile. Every curved piece was carved from solid blocks of stone at the factory: the treads shaped to the radius of the stair, the wall panels cut to follow it and then ribbed so the grooves line up from one panel to the next. We worked from the architect's drawings to template each piece, had the full run cut and dry-fitted before it shipped, and crated it in installation order.

On site it went in exactly as drawn. No piece had to be recut, and the grooves meet across every joint. As our founder, Michael Cohen, puts it, it was supplied without a hitch, from the factory to the last tread.

The award

In April 2014 the project won the Coverings Installation & Design Award for Commercial Stone Design, the tile and stone industry's national award, presented at Coverings in Las Vegas. The judges singled out the carved curved stair and walls as the kind of work that can only be done in natural stone.

The result

More than a decade on, the lobby still looks the way it did on opening day, and it was the start of a long relationship: we have since supplied stone, mosaics and locker-room tile for more than sixty Equinox clubs.