T Magazine: Lea Colombo’s Monumental Stone Furniture

courtesy of Lea Colombo

Born and raised in Cape Town, Lea Colombo moved at 18 to Paris, where she established herself as a fashion photographer for brands like Prada and Chanel. Yet in recent years, after stints in London and New York, she began to miss her hometown, eventually buying a house there. Feeling invigorated by the landscape, she started creating sculptures in 2021 out of red jasper, a stone found in South Africa’s Northern Cape province as well as Namibia. Russet-hued and intricately veined, the material is “harder than steel,” she says. Last year, she made furniture from it, selling some of her first creations — a coffee table, a dining table and matching low stools — to Matthieu Blazy, the artistic director of Chanel. Now, Colombo, 32, is crafting bar consoles as well as stools and tables to order, all featuring red jasper and semiprecious gems sourced from nearby mines. The pieces have an organic, almost primitive feel and are often monumental in scale: Her Twin Flame dining table — a slab bisected by a natural fissure and mounted on a base made from irregularly shaped blocks of amethyst, rose quartz, dragon jasper, chalcedony, sodalite and tiger’s-eye — weighs more than 1,600 pounds. “I’m attracted to the colors of these stones,” she says. “They hold energy and frequency and have the power to excite.”