Mandir

Plum marble is a dark purple-brown with fine pale veins, and here it is cut as a box whose sides slope inward to the foot, so the cabinet reads as heavier at the top than at the base and the shadow under it is deep. The green marble, brown and gold veins branching across a dark ground, is cut as one tall strip and set flush into the walnut, so the three materials sit in one plane with no mouldings between them. The walnut is panelled, and the panelling is what makes the stone read as set in, not stuck on.

It is the household shrine, in a hall or a corner of a living room, and it is used every morning: lamps lit on the stone top, flowers set along it, the cabinet below holding what the ritual needs. The top is at the height of a standing person's hands. Stone takes oil, water and flame without harm, which is why a shrine is made of marble and not of wood.

Three materials, one plane, one gap. The detail is the gap under the cabinet, 290 mm: the height that lets the floor be cleaned under the shrine without moving anything, and the height that makes a stone box this heavy appear to hang from the wall, with its shadow below it as the only sign of what holds it.