Meet the Maker: Pierre Bidaud, Creative Director, The Stonemasonry Company
Pierre Bidaud is the creative director at The Stonemasonry Company, which delivers bespoke stonework projects by combining traditional masonry skills with modern technology and engineering.
Since joining The Stonemasonry Company 13 years ago, Pierre has overseen numerous high-profile projects including the three-storey staircase at Hermes on Madison Avenue and the pioneering limestone facade at the Stirling Prize-shortlisted 15 Clerkenwell Close.
LA London is proud to be one of The Stonemasonry Company’s first commissioners. Having worked with Pierre and his team on several key projects, including the extraordinary floating staircase at Camp End Manor as well as a top secret current commission(!), we were delighted to find out more about his career to date, his passion for sustainability, and his commitment to democratising the use of stone in construction.
1. Can you tell us a little about your background and how you came to work at The Stonemasonry Company?
The Stirling Prize-shortlisted 15 Clerkenwell Close.
I have been a stonemason since 1989 after training in France, mostly on heritage buildings. I travelled across the country refining my craft, and spent a year working at Gloucester Cathedral.
I moved to the UK 25 years ago and developed an interest in the engineering and structural aspects of building work. In 2012 I joined The Stonemasonry Company to develop bespoke solutions in load-bearing stone. We design and make challenging stone structures for clients in luxury real estate, hospitality and retail.
2. What does your role as creative director entail?
I’m responsible for load-bearing and structural design, research and development, and business development. We produce challenging structures where the stone is used for all its beautiful, mechanical capabilities, rather than just for decorative purposes.
We have lots of fun with extremely complicated projects – like the one we’re working on at the moment with LA London that I can’t talk about for reasons of client confidentiality. Staircases can be very complicated where there is no load-bearing wall and you’ve got to find engineering tricks to support them.
The staircase at Camp End Manor was the third staircase we worked on, but the first to complete a 270° rotation and one of the lightest ones we’ve ever developed. We really pushed the envelope on that project by making it asymmetrical – it’s slightly thicker on one side and thinner on the other. We wanted to make it as elegant and efficient as possible and it became a really beautiful and important selling point of the house.
Above: The ‘floating’ stone staircase at Camp End Manor, designed by The Stonemasonry Company and LA London with Webb Yates.
We’re also working as a business to promote stone as a commodity rather than a luxury, on the back of what we’ve learned from these projects. We want to democratise stone as a material in modern construction.
3. How important is sustainability to The Stonemasonry Company?
“A beautiful structure is not where you add things, but where you take things out, so that it becomes a poem to lightness.”
It’s extremely important. I am a stonemason and the company directors are stonemasons. People who work closely with the material and have an intimate relationship with it tend to be very much in love with it. We want to use it to the best of its capacity.
We want to respect the material by not being too indulgent or wasteful with it. The most elegant buildings have been as beautifully engineered as possible. A beautiful structure is not where you add things, but where you take things out, so that it becomes a poem to lightness. It evokes the reaction, ‘Wow, how does this work?’
The material we extract from the earth demands a lot of energy – maybe not as much as concrete or metal, but a lot of people and energy are still deployed. You should respect that energy in the use of your material. This also means that the result tends to be more elegant.
4. What is your favourite stone to work with?
That’s a tricky one! When you’re an apprentice, the first stone you work with sets a benchmark. I started working with sandstone in the east of France and I love a beautiful sandstone that’s easy on the chisel and has a tightness of grain. You can have very sharp edges on the arises and edges of your moulding.
“It’s passion and love that make the stone beautiful. It depends on the workmanship as much as the raw material.”
I’m only an OK stonemason so I would say Carrara marble from Italy would be slightly wasted on me – I wouldn’t have the skill of an Italian sculptor to shape it. But fresh Carrara marble is just amazing to work.
I was in Cairo last week looking at granite. In France, granite is usually used for tombstones and it’s overpolished and ugly as hell, but under the hammer of Egyptian workers from 2600BC it’s just magnificent – the deployment of skills is amazing, even though it’s just simple granite. So for me, it’s about the passion and love that goes into the trade to make the stone beautiful. It depends on the workmanship as much as the raw material.
The simple elegance and beauty of a Stonemasonry Company floating stone stair
5. What projects are you most looking forward to this year?
A staircase by The Stonemasonry Company at the Loewe store on New Bond Street.
We’ve developed a staircase for the new Loewe store in Paris – the third one we’ve produced for LVMH. We’re also starting to develop a beautiful staircase for a big research lab in Oxford with Foster + Partners. It’s exciting to have moved from the elegant and very private staircases of residential properties like Camp End Manor to big headquarters in retail and the research industry.
On a slightly less glamorous but equally exciting note, we’re developing some cladding for a toilet block in central London. The stone has been reused from a 1970s building, recut and reshaped and given a new life as thick, colourful cladding. This has allowed the stone to go further, rather than being crushed and used as aggregate.
6. What is your proudest professional achievement?
It may sound like a cliché but I’m proud of all our projects at The Stonemasonry Company. Thanks to the positive mindset of the design team, a strong team spirit and a lot of head-scratching and trial and error, we always manage to deliver, despite the constraints and challenges we encounter.
Having said that, it was amazing to see the unveiling of our three-floor stone staircase at Hermes on Madison Avenue in New York. We worked with a great team, including our engineer Webb Yates in Shoreditch and our partner in New York, Precision Stone.
For a small business based in Rutland, which 18 years ago no one knew about, working with RDAI – one of the top architects in the world – this was a thrilling moment!
www.thestonemasonrycompany.co.uk
LA London’s ‘Meet the Maker’ series features our contemporaries and collaborators who share our passion for sustainability, from the materials we use through to new practices and technology. Look out for more in the series on our website and social media platforms.