Fashioned in stunningly unique colorways, each one-of-a-kind piece is hand-poured by Concrete Cat in Montréal.
Concrete is beautiful. Each hand-thrown slab takes on patterns and colors in a way that’s wholly unique. It has a tactile quality to it, a texture, and feel. And it has an elegance, an almost delicate aesthetic despite the fact it’s just about indestructible. It’s nothing like what people think when they hear the word concrete, and that’s what we love about it, it’s unexpected in its beauty and its artfulness.
SPOTLIGHT:
Shawna and Matt chose concrete purely by happenstance. Matt was working with it as a laborer at a construction job and thought the concrete might be magic. You take essential dust and dirt, mix it with water, wait a day and you have solid stone. You can make a tiny ashtray out of it, or the Hoover Dam—the scalability alone is mind-blowing. Concrete Cat has been an ongoing experiment to create something surprising and delightful out of material that most would associate with utilitarianism and brutalism.
MADE BY HAND
They mix and pour everything entirely by hand—they don't use mixers. On average they mix a few hundred pounds of concrete a day—over the course of a year, that's 8-12 tons of concrete. The consistency generated from mixing by hand is one of the big reasons their pieces look so great. It's the first step in getting all of their processes to fall into place.
AN EYE FOR COLOR
Their colors are achieved by using integral mineral pigments. They're always sourcing and testing new pigments to achieve their colors—much like pottery glazes, pigments can change between dye lots quarterly. They have a catalog of approximately 100 base tones and 400 different combinations for their Oracle Pattern. They mix all of their colors from primary colors, and they're quite proud to say they're really great at color theory.
When they cast, they mix multiple batches of their mineral pigmented concrete based on these tracked recipes.
FILLING THE NOOKS
Once they've mixed the concrete to the perfect consistency, they place and push the concrete into all the nooks of the mold, ensuring as little air voids as possible. Air is a component in concrete and needed for pieces that experience freeze and thaw cycles. Their control over the air in a mold ensures that they get buttery-smooth surface textures.
They let the objects cure for a day and then pop the objects out of the molds. Then, they grind and polish the bottoms and edges, and fill and voids they don't like the looks of. But they don't fill them all. Embrace the void.
Let's fix that.
