Cole & Son | Meditation Stone

Kyoto's most celebrated rock garden has no recorded designer. Who laid out the stones, and on what principle, has been argued over for centuries, and the absence of an answer is part of why the garden continues to be visited. Meditation Stone takes its subject from that arrangement, and specifically from the placing of the stones rather than from the stones themselves.

What the design reproduces is interval. The forms are set apart at distances that feel considered without being regular, and the eye moves between them the way it is meant to move between rocks in a raked garden: resting, then travelling, then resting again. Each stone is drawn with a soft, worked surface, so the wall acquires texture as well as rhythm and reads as something quarried rather than printed.

It behaves as a semi-plain, which makes it unusually easy to place. There is no figure to compete with furniture and no direction to fight the architecture, so it will hold a whole room without asserting itself. It was drawn to sit alongside Kaki Persimmon and Bonsai Garden, and works as a calmer ground in a scheme where one of those carries the pattern. Low, raking light suits it best, since the worked surface of each stone only shows when the light crosses it.