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It all started when I got a call from interior designer Julie Doran. Been a long time. Where you been? “Second career as a flight attendant, third career as a full-time mom. Now, I’m back into design.” What’s up? “Got a new client. I’m designing a tricked-out outdoor kitchen. I think you may be just the guy to do the countertops.”
In fact, it was recommended that we avoid promoting this product and, if we had to sell it, that the variegated results should be disguised by buffing with a colored wax.
As concretists, each of us defines ourselves as “one who practices concrete poetry.” As we craft this material, we are crafting a poem. At the most basic level, that poem can be a haiku — deceptively simple.
Our task had been to art-direct the placement of a new natural gray topping slab, and to subsequently patina it to simulate some 20 years of hard use. In other words, we were turning it from gray to “that special gray.”
There are clients who will say, “I’d just die for a floor like that!” But, of course, there’s no decorative concrete worth dying for. So, do as I say, and not as I did. Please, be careful out there.
I was once a much younger concretist, really impetuous and passionate. I was working for L.M. Scofield Co., and as my wife told me, I worked way too much. So she left me. To be more accurate, she left me in charge of the kids for 10 days while she and her best girlfriend toured a bit of England and Scotland.
As the concretist, we’ve worked both internationally and nationwide. But some of the jobs are in the smallest, quaintest towns. They might not be major population centers, but the concrete in those places are that much more sweet, The people are warm even while the weather often isn’t.
Whether more utilitarian or more exotic, these are forms that every general contractor and every concrete guy is familiar with. We all have the tools and the formulae to produce these lines, angles and shapes.
We ate. We drank. We told the truth and lied, and then admitted that we had lied. We laughed. We talked business. We talked wives. We talked ex-wives. We cried, but just a little.
Mike Miller reminicses about the times he was asked to help complete a complex concrete projects from his past.
