The world's foremost magazine on decorative concrete
When Cody Carpenter invited Warren Ness as the vertical concrete carving instructor for Carpenter’s Plan B Studio training program last fall in Tacoma, Washington, Ness detailed plans to make a coffee table. It would resemble a large boulder with pops of color, dendritic plant embellishments and a flat top. The […]
Unlike God almighty who, according to the Bible, created the world, its heavens and all forms of life in six days, the best Troy Lemon and his mortal crew could do was hand-form and carve a concrete replica of the moon in four.
Adrian Gascon has reinvented himself personally and professionally a few times. He sold cars and played and coached baseball and basketball, then through luck and hard work began fabricating top-secret planes for the government, making $20 an hour at 20 years old.
Richard Winget sees himself as a glorified copycat, an artisan who uses concrete and other mediums to simulate everything from cavern environments, majestic rockscapes and award-winning underwater reefs to rain forests, waterfalls and mountain landscapes.
David Seils’ master craft, wall relief sculpture, is an art form that dates back to ancient times, when civilizations carved designs into stone walls, buildings and columns. But instead of chiseling away material, the Asheville, N.C.-based Seils builds up his wall sculptures in layers using mortar, a mason’s hawk and a trowel.
Pete Johnson, who founded the U.K. division of the stone-effect coating system manufacturer StoneCoat, traveled to Sin City from his home in Manchester, England, last November for a project inspired by the natural stone colors found in Nevada.
Their still-in-progress project includes a number of concrete features inside the home, the centerpiece being a cast-in-place, carved, stamped GFRC staircase that resembles rock and leads into the basement-level man cave, graced by a sun-and-clouds water feature on the wall next to the staircase.
Most cellars consist of pretty straightforward temperature control and wine-racking systems but Nathan Giffin, owner of Creative Rock Forming and the creative powerhouse behind a recent wine cellar project in Naperville, Ill., has rather a different idea of what a private wine cellar can be.
Troy Lemon, founder and president of Cornerstone Decorative Concrete in Holland, Mich., starts his story with a familiar admission. “I was a concrete guy way before I was a decorative concrete guy,” he says.
When Brian Graham opened Hard Rock Developments Inc. in Calgary in 2000, he wanted the concrete tool and supply shop to be different from your standard concrete store. “My Dad was a concrete contractor, so when I was growing up, I went with him to concrete supply stores pretty often,” he says. anyone, including a concrete contractor.”
