In stone speak the word “igneous” comes from a Greek word for fire. Deep inside the earth, the temperature is very high and the minerals there are in liquid form called magma. As the magma pushes towards the earth’s surface, it starts to cool and turns into solid igneous rock. There’s a little bit of geology for you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For those of you who love a bit of porphyry, we thought you might enjoy seeing where our Italian porphyry comes from and how it’s quarried. Typically it’s not quarried in large blocks like granite, but instead sheers off and has a natural split finish.  It’s extracted in a similar way to slate or other sedimentary split stones like our  Cobb & co.

Porphyry is really hard wearing and forgiving in colour which gives it a really  durable external surface making it ideal for driveways or a demanding floor environment. It requires little maintenance due to its density and the natural colour variation in the stone which makes it a perfect fit for high traffic areas.  The porphyry cobbles have a really flat surface finish and although there are some variations in thickness, they can be laid relatively quickly.

So there you have it.

The philosophy behind Urban Crop is all about keeping your herbs and flowers alive. Instead of harvesting them  – think tulips which have been hacked off at the stems and stuck in a bowl of  water in the florists or herbs which have been cut and jammed into plastic wrap to sit out the last of their days in aisle 5 at Coles – Urban Crop plants come with the root system intact which means they still have their life source with them.  Without this root system a plant is dead but Urban Crop plants are alive, full of energy and nutrients.

Urban Crop herbs and flowers come in a nutritious natural  soil which is full of life, so the plants go home with you, complete with their own little supply of soil.  This is their fuel so they recommend  that each plant should be kept in their packaging for the duration of their stay. Gone are the days of cut flowers which will be lucky to last the weekend before they start to droop or basil which was bought for a salad but becomes so slimy that even pesto seems out of the question.

They’re alive, they’re unharvested and they’re full of life. What’s more, Urban Crop believe in the after life; so once you’ve enjoyed the razzle dazzle, simply pop the plant and packaging back in your own compost. Flowers often feel like an expensive gift that rarely lasts long and seems kind of wasteful; likewise for those of us who can’t grow a herb garden, a bunch of herbs is often too much for one meal yet with such a short lifespan you often can’t use them for more than a few days once they’ve been harvested. What a lovely idea. I don’t know about you but I’m starting to feel all warm inside.

At the moment we’ve got fantastic NSW and QLD sales teams and we’re looking for just one more sales superstar in each state. Not a whole pack, not an entire family, just one. We’re looking for someone to work with architects, landscape designers & builders  and basically look after some of our important client accounts. You might have worked in a similar industry, you might have worked in retail sales, you might have even been a landscaper or maybe you’ve never been anything but have yearnings to be something great.  We’re not too fussed about having “industry experience”, if you’ve got it fantastic, if you don’t – don’t worry, we’re mostly looking for a person who is the right fit – the rest you can learn on the job. Promise.

So if you live in NSW [Brookvale showroom] or QLD [Fortitude Valley showroom] and you’re looking for a new challenge yourself or know someone who might be, please download the job description Eco Outdoor Account Manager and drop us a line and say hello. We’d love to hear from you.

All hellos can be sent to jen@ecooutdoor.com.au

PS > This image was kindly borrowed from Flickr’s Martin van Asseldonk

There’s now officially four and a half weeks until Saturday in Design hits Melbourne’s streets on Fri 6th and Sat 7th August.

Prototype Working Sessions @ Eco Outdoor // +Friday

Leave work early on +Friday for a sneak peak at the new Eco Outdoor designed ranges as we take you from concept to creation. We’ll also be inviting  visitors to preview the working drawings of some brand new prototypes for 2011-12.  These invite-only prototype working sessions give you the chance to see the furniture design process from beginning to end and more importantly, to tell us what you think of the new stuff we’re currently working on.  Experience the furniture design process from concept to creation.

Join the Design Conversation @ Eco Outdoor Bollinger Bar // + Saturday

Our design team will be in store presenting the new 2011 Summer Range featuring the much anticipated  Zuma outdoor chair . This is the perfect chance to experience the design process from concept to creation. What’s more, you can join our design team for a delightfully refreshing beverage at the Eco Outdoor Bollinger Bar which will be running throughout the day.

We’re big believers that design should be a two way conversation between the designed product and the designed space it occupies. We’re also big believers in Bollinger. So join us for a glass of bubbly at the Eco Outdoor Bollinger Bar and join in the design conversation.

For more information on Saturday in Design, check it out here

If you’d like to check out our current collection, download a snapshot of the range here Eco furniture range preview

Here the Belgian brand Extremis showed up with a very unexpected product. It was not a new design. It was a kit. Or more exactly a box in which one found the right to re-create a single version of ones favorite Extremis product. Each official license in the box contains the necessary drawings and specifications to have the design made. Though the concept was not presented as an eco-friendly idea, it most certainly is: it saves transporting designs, encourages the use of locally sourced materials and provides work to valued local craftsmen.

Dirk Wynants, the creative head of Extremis and innovative mind behind this very controversial idea, explains that the value of an Extremis product encompasses not only a production process but also the intellectual property. As a reflection of the importance of this ‘intangible’ part of the final product, the pack costs 20 percent of the price for an actual product.

You can check out more here

The sandstone used in the international fit outs was called Pietra Serena, a high quality Italian sandstone which is more uniform than traditional sandstones, without any structural veining. It presents a consistent grayish blue colour with even tones. The final cuts for the Apple project produced tiles that were precisely 750mm x 750mm x 20 mm.

A critical element of the quarrying and cutting process for Apple was to perfectly match the color and texture of the stone. Since the stone is a medium-toned color, any variation in lightness or darkness would be very conspicuous—tiles of different tones would make the inside of an Apple store would look like a chessboard. An exterior stone wall would looking similarly odd, with varying tones of stone. It’s been reported that Apple purchased an entire quarry in order to reserve and guarantee that it would have a supply of stone from the same vein of sandstone, helping to insure a uniform grain and tone. More likely, Apple has reserved a portion of the Il Casone quarry for its own future needs.

Il Casone says that Apple’s architects, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, “prefer a regular pattern of laying (the stone tiles), without staggering any of the slabs and with very subtle joints in terms of colour and thickness. The consequent idea is to create a continuous plane. The perceptive result is a pale and orderly backdrop, whose strength and character lie in the elegance of each millimetre of surface, without ever interfering with the interpretation of places, with the avant-garde technology enclosed in chromium-plated metals and glass, or with the relationship between customer and product.”

Our Bolzano sandstone is mined in the same quarry as Pietra Serena and is essentially the same however Pietra Serena is mined near the top of the quarry whereas Bolzano is mined further down in the quarry making it denser (and therefore stronger) because it has been exposed to more heat closer to the earth’s core and has undergone more compacting.

Check it out here

Check out this unusual approach to landscape design. Here the concrete pavement has literally been cracked down the middle to form garden-bed style rows and planted out with a variety of greenery and flowering plants.

If this was your garden, no doubt you’d be tempted to just put a stack of pots around with plants to try and green up the space. CMG have provided a rather unusual take on garden design but a refreshingly original one nevertheless. And for $500, who’s complaining? Not the owners we bet.

It just goes to show that there’s no such thing as a boring outdoor space, just boring design and gee, what a difference a little imagination makes…

Landscape Architecture: CMG Landscape Architecture

Area: 75m²

Location: San Francisco, CA

Awards: ASLA 2009 award

Photography: Tom Fox

This weekly garden profile was brought to you by our friends at Landzine