The Deep Dive: A Sink That Looks Like a Sculpture

As any issue of Dwell proves, the choice of material or joinery method can transform a good project into a design for the ages. The Deep Dive is a forum where design and building pros can obsess over those details. Here we ask expert colleagues to share the inspiration behind house elements that delight clients—as well as the nitty-gritty information about how they were built.

When Keith Jordan—co-owner of the recently renovated San Francisco apartment featured in the January/February issue—revealed his love of Carrara marble to architect Tommy Haddock in 2019, Haddock decided to introduce more of the material into the house uniquely. Although the founder of local firm Haddock Studio had only launched his San Francisco–based business three years earlier, he had been incorporating custom furniture and installations from day one.

"In terms of creating an atmosphere, furniture is an extension of the architecture," Haddock says of his multidisciplinary approach to designing a space. Thanks to supportive clients in those early years, "I would go about meeting with fabricators to figure out the material sourcing and pricing and, through introductions or by luck, I started to develop nice relationships with artisans."

A stone carver named Rocky Yuren Estrada counted among Haddock’s lucky creative partnerships. "I was on a morning run and ran by a stone studio that looked cool, and I just wandered in," the architect says of the initial meeting.

Haddock first realized a floor lamp with Estrada, then a table. For a third collaboration, Haddock conceived a chiseled Carrara marble sink for Keith and his husband Aamer Mumtaz. Installed in the primary bathroom, the sink would have a split-face exterior and a smooth counter transitioning into a half-sphere basin. The rustic outward appearance would stand in contrast to the meticulously fabricated marble already surrounding the apartment’s fireplace. It would also advance the project’s overall goal of celebrating the apartment’s Victorian-era details while inserting harmonious, yet discernibly distinct expression.

Keith and Aamer got on board with the washbasin almost immediately. The couple worked with Haddock to clarify the stone’s final size, using a cardboard mockup to arrive at a 14-by-24-inch surface that provided just enough usable area without interfering with circulation: "It’s a tight bathroom," Haddock says; "The game of this whole project was to create rooms that felt spacious without changing the footprint of the house."

Estrada, on the other hand, was less game. An experienced hand in realistic busts, he was not quite sure how to make a marble hulk so naturalistic that it might seem newly extracted from the earth. Haddock suggested that they prototype the concept using cheaper limestone. "We did some tests on chiseling the face and, after thinking about how marble breaks differently, we said, ‘Okay, enough tests.’"

With the switch to marble, the carver began removing material from a block of Carrara. "We began with one corner of the cube, and we spoke about how it broke. There was discussion about one side coming off more than the other, and we agreed that imbalance [in the overall shape] was preferable to, say, an uneven bowl," Haddock says of the process that ensued, concluding, "I encouraged artistic freedom. And the material guided how that was to look for us."

Haddock designed and fabricated multiple elements for the Jordan-Mumtaz Home. Of these interventions, the architect says, "The point was to not create things of an identifiable period, so they might fit well with the Victorian fabric." He adds that generally speaking, "In much of the work I do, honesty in materiality is important. I’m also drawn to elemental shapes like circles and squares." Inside Aamer and Keith’s primary bathroom, the Carrara marble sink is not only an emblem of Haddock’s ambitions for the renovation or his wider body of work, but also a source of gravitas and biophilic calm.

Despite the petite dimensions, the final sink weighs 300 pounds. The little giant is held in place by a quartet of threaded three-quarter-inch stainless steel rods, which are welded at a 10-degree angle to a quarter-inch steel plate. Haddock replaced the bathroom’s interior wall assembly with steel studs, and the sink’s mounting plate is secured to those studs via welding. The architect also had the faucet’s set screw removed prior to installation, to set it an inch deeper into the wall than the screw would have permitted. "We needed the inch to center the faucet to the sink and align it to the drain. It’s a small thing, but in the day-to-day use of the bathroom the customization feels really present," Haddock explains.

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