PHYTOSTONE
is a woman-led firm that invents modernized natural materials for crafting your ideal home
About us
PHYTOSTONE's woman-developed formulations combine pure plant and mineral ingredients to create "botanical cements".
And woman-developed "materiality" is important because most of what makes the Built Environment, like Portland cement and drywall, foam and plywood, was developed without our creative contribution. Female-driven building innovation represents an ocean of pure possibility, a 'sleeping giantess' if you will. Which is exactly what construction needs.
And woman-developed "materiality" is important because most of what makes the Built Environment, like Portland cement and drywall, foam and plywood, was developed without our creative contribution. Female-driven building innovation represents an ocean of pure possibility, a 'sleeping giantess' if you will. Which is exactly what construction needs.
PHYTOSTONE is not accepting work in 2023
PHYTOSTONE Look Book
So far, PHYTOSTONE has come up with
Waterproof adobe.
Biochar-based wall infill.
A petrifying wood treatment fortified with Vetiver essential oils.
Pure, powdered, just-add-water clay paints.
Liquid glass and plant glue hybrid paints.
"Easy-Up" tadelakt.
Air-filtering coatings aggregated with diatomaceous earth and volcanic zeolites.
Fiber-rich plasters enhanced with coconut coir and grasses.
Insulative plasters that contain perlite, iron and recycled glass.
Nutrient dense materials that auto-fertilize home vegetable growing systems.
When you build with our materials, you build with our values
As specified by...
Materiality
The sum total of physical elements that make up your home. Many architects define it
merely as the interrelationship of textures, colors, forms and types of different materials.
It's what makes a house a house: bricks, timber, steel etc. But we also include what you
can't see in our definition: sustainability, origins, endings, ethics and the
wholesomeness of a material. We advocate for a materiality that prioritizes what's on
the inside. Beauty and performance run skin deep, but ethics form the character of a
material.
Why include 'sustainability', which is immaterial, in a term that sounds like the opposite?
Because sustainability's presence – or lack of- permeates a material's physical form. For
example, building with timber that was responsibly and regeneratively grown is
fundamentally different than using illicitly harvested Amazonian wood. It may be an
invisible difference when you hold the wood in your hand, yet there are physical,
MATERIAL ramifications on the natural world created by these divergent practices.
Because of this, we invite you to support a materiality that includes ethical metrics, and
not just skin deep qualities.
merely as the interrelationship of textures, colors, forms and types of different materials.
It's what makes a house a house: bricks, timber, steel etc. But we also include what you
can't see in our definition: sustainability, origins, endings, ethics and the
wholesomeness of a material. We advocate for a materiality that prioritizes what's on
the inside. Beauty and performance run skin deep, but ethics form the character of a
material.
Why include 'sustainability', which is immaterial, in a term that sounds like the opposite?
Because sustainability's presence – or lack of- permeates a material's physical form. For
example, building with timber that was responsibly and regeneratively grown is
fundamentally different than using illicitly harvested Amazonian wood. It may be an
invisible difference when you hold the wood in your hand, yet there are physical,
MATERIAL ramifications on the natural world created by these divergent practices.
Because of this, we invite you to support a materiality that includes ethical metrics, and
not just skin deep qualities.
Parity
Gender parity in construction is about creating a space for the other 50% of humanity's talent pool – women – to manifest new visions for the built environment. Currently women are very pigeonholed as the decorators of a home and as consumers. But building, engineering, design and materials science has yet to realize the full impact of women-driven innovation. This void of unrealized potential is one of the great opportunities of our age.
Circularity
Circularity is about building systems with the principal of regeneration embedded within them. Regeneration requires reverse engineering, where we consider the entire life cycle of a building. Most of today's buildings are designed to have a linear life span starting with the raw materials and ending with a landfill. Tomorrow's buildings will be designed for re-integration into new products or even compost. With Circularity, the end of service life is just another beginning.
