The Caliche Project
Caliche Liquor Cabinet
47” wide x 22” deep x 74” tall
Materials: Earthen Plaster (Clay Rich Soil From Right Outside Our Shop, Local Sand and Straw), Maple Hardwood, Linseed Oil, Mirror
The Caliche Liquor Cabinet began by thinking about the natural history of dirt as burrows and nests and long storage to get through the winter; the way the earth holds a den for hibernation, the stability and freedom of a mud swallows’ nest, the cellar my great grandfather dug to keep the harvest all year long - the ancient history of earth as a place to harbor and protect.
This cabinet brings that history to life in the modern ritual of storing and mixing drinks. The design process was rooted in looking at Hoosier cabinets and old cast iron stoves, fixtures of a nostalgic homeliness, and grew into earthy, organic forms reminiscent of Art Nouveau or Rococo. The cabinet shimmers between those two poles, uncertain if this is a familiar or fantastical object.
That ambiguity pairs with the strangeness of creating an object devoted to luxury consumption out of mud. It’s simultaneously grounded and buoyant, reminding us during those rituals of hospitality and renewal to root into those beautifully sweet moments of life.
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Technique
The Caliche Project begins with the soil. Specifically, in this case, the dirt dug out of the yard of our lead designer, Chase Ankeny. In New Mexico, where we’re based, there’s a long tradition of building most of a house using mostly the dirt from the land it’s built on - adobe blocks baked in the sun, clay plasters to smooth and protect the walls, built up earthen floors stabilized with oxblood.
Hundred year old adobe block wall in our shop
This project reimagines that ancient tradition by making earthen plaster - essentially mud dug straight from the ground mixed with some sand and straw for strength - and applying it to a carved wooden structure to create furniture that’s strikingly beautiful, lasts generations and, when discarded, dissolves back into the earth.
Concept and Form
The sustainability of this dust-to-dust lifecycle is important, but there is also a radical strangeness in this material, used for the bulk of the built environment for most of our ancestors through most of history. It’s become utterly foreign to us. As a society we often disregard or fetishize materials that are minimally processed while we elevate those that have been refined until they become unrecognizable from the raw stuff gathered to make them. The history of luxury goods is built on creating an artificial separation between the beautiful finished product and the destruction that went into its creation - it’s often a refined veil behind which we hide the pillaging of the earth.
Applying raw linseed oil to stabilize the plaster
It doesn't have to be. Our goal for this project is to design opulent forms that we can make out of this humble material to ask the question of why all this destruction in the name of beauty when we can create compelling objects out of little more than dirt from right outside our door?
Earthen Urn
12 ¼” wide x 8 ½” wide x 6 ⅝” tall
Materials: Earthen Plaster ( (Clay Rich Soil From Right Outside Our Shop, Local Sand and Straw), Maple Hardwood, Linseed oil
One of the first proof of concepts for this project was a funerary urn - a box of earth for the ashes of the dead. Its form is based on an archetypal treasure chest, drawing a tension between the luxury implied in the form and the base-ness of its construction out of soil. The program also plays into that tension - the appropriateness of putting a body into something made out of earth contrasted with mausoleums, fine ceramic urns, carved granite tombstones, the one rooted in the transitory nature of our bodies and the other reaching for a flawless eternity. The goal is to span all of those things and remind us that everything, in the end, returns to dirt.
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