We left Lisbon before dawn on a Monday in October, heading south on the A2 with the boot of the car carrying nothing but a notebook, a tape measure, and a bag of stone samples from the previous season. The Alentejo begins properly once you cross the Tagus — the landscape flattens, the sky expands, and the light takes on a particular quality that is different from anywhere else in Portugal. White and hard and very clear.

The quarries around Estremoz and Borba have been producing marble and limestone for centuries. The Romans worked them. The stone in many of Lisbon’s oldest buildings was cut here and shipped down the Tagus by barge. What surprised us, arriving for the first time several years ago, was how present the history feels: you can see old working faces in the quarry walls alongside the fresh cuts, pale and almost white against the older, weathered surface.

We were there for two pieces. The Tuff Side Table requires a block of Roman travertine with consistent density and minimal voids — the natural cavities that give travertine its characteristic surface. Too many voids and the honing process leaves the piece looking pitted rather than quiet. The Slab Bench requires something different: Portuguese limestone with enough variation in the surface that the split face reads as genuinely geological rather than decoratively rough.

Choosing stone

Stone selection is a slow business. You cannot do it from a catalogue or a photograph. The colour of a marble changes as the block is cut deeper — what begins as pale cream can shift toward pink or grey within a metre. Texture varies within the same formation. We spent two days at the first quarry, moving through the yard with Horácio, the yard manager, who has been cutting stone here since the 1980s and has an almost geological knowledge of each formation. He knows which blocks will polish well and which will not, which will hold a honed finish and which have inclusions that only become visible after cutting.

By the end of the second day we had marked eight candidate blocks with chalk. By the fourth day, after visiting two more quarries and spending an afternoon with Pedreira Santo António in Évora, we had reduced the selection to three: one block of travertine for the side tables, and two of limestone for the bench series. Horácio photographed each one for our records and we sat on the low wall outside his office and ate bread and sardines and talked about the harvest.

The stone arrived at the workshop six weeks later, cut and labelled. When the travertine block was opened on the saw, the interior was a very pale warm grey, almost cream, with a regular pattern of small voids and almost no colour variation. It was exactly right. There is no way to know that in advance. You make a considered guess and then you wait.