Brown Onyx Marble Crate

The Marble Crates are based on the humble wooden market crate — an anonymous object designed purely for transport and storage. For centuries, wooden crates have carried fruit and vegetables from the fields to the marketplace, forming part of an everyday infrastructure of cultivation, trade and exchange.

Reconstructed in marble, the familiar utilitarian form is given permanence and weight. The series explores the relationship between function and material, transforming an ephemeral object of circulation into one intended to endure.

Designed by Trine Guldager for Autumn Cph, the crates are handmade in Pietrasanta, Italy, in collaboration with a fifth-generation family-run marble workshop.

The Onyx Crates form a special series within the collection. Made in very small editions or as unique pieces, each crate brings together three different types of stone, selected from existing fragments and offcuts in the workshop. Rather than seeking uniformity, the construction allows differences in colour, veining, translucency and surface to remain visible.

The combination of stones gives these pieces a more robust and singular character than the regular Marble Crates. Each is determined by the materials available at the time of making, turning the crate into a composition of individual stone fragments.

A collaboration between material, machine, designer and marble craftsman, each object carries traces of both its construction and the particular stones from which it is made.

No two crates are identical.

The Brown Onyx Marble Crate was produced as a numbered edition of three. This piece is the final example in the edition, numbered 3/3.