Travertine Marble Crate

Travertine 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. Each piece is constructed from repurposed marble offcuts, allowing existing fragments of stone to determine the colour, veining and individual character of the object.

Originally made to carry, the crate becomes a structure for display — a base for arranging, presenting and giving significance to other objects. In this shift, the act of carrying becomes an act of showing.

This crate is made from repurposed beige travertine, a sedimentary limestone characterised by its porous structure, small natural cavities and subtle variations in tone. Travertine has been used as a building material since antiquity and has a particularly long history within Italian architecture.

No two crates are identical.