Savor The Beauty Of Sandstone With These Au Naturel Lamps

While students at the University of Cincinnati, Hank Beyer and Alex Sizemore spent a summer studying the operations of a family-owned quarry located along the Berea sandstone formation in northeastern Ohio. After turning some of the quarry’s discarded stone offcuts into lamps, they attracted the eye of talent scout Leo Lei, founder of minimalist-design outlet and online publication Leibal. Returning to the site this past winter, Beyer and Sizemore—the founders of San Francisco studio HB-AS—spent a week salvaging more sandstone fragments to be shipped back to their West Coast workshop. There, they spent the subsequent six months crafting Berea Sandstone, a new series of 11 lamps exclusive to Leibal. Each piece is formed with minimum intervention: raw and deliberately crude in shape. As such, it’s a rich reflection of the mining process.