About

We import marble by hand, in small quantities, from a country where people have been carving it for a very long time.

Ritam Studio began with a friendship. A friend in Jaipur runs a small family workshop that has been cutting and finishing stone for years, mostly for export to Canada, Europe and the Middle East. On a visit we watched a tray being shaped — the block chosen for its veining, the edge worked down by hand, brass set into the surface in a single unbroken line — and could not think of a reason that work shouldn't be on tables in New Zealand.

The stone

Almost everything we carry is Makrana marble or travertine. Makrana is the white stone quarried in Rajasthan that was used to build the Taj Mahal; it's dense, it takes a deep polish, and it doesn't yellow. Travertine is warmer and more open, with the banded, sandy veining you can see running through our coaster sets. Both are cut from natural blocks, which means every piece is genuinely one of a kind — and that a coaster from one run will not match a coaster from the next.

The workshop

Our pieces are made by one family workshop outside Jaipur. They work in small batches to order rather than holding warehouse stock, so our range is deliberately short — a handful of trays, a few coaster sets, tea light holders in three heights. When something sells out, the next run comes from a different block and looks a little different. We'd rather tell you that plainly than pretend to a consistency natural stone doesn't have.

Getting it here

Everything travels by sea, which takes a couple of months, and then sits in our hands in New Zealand before it reaches yours. We check every piece, wrap it, and send it locally. It is a slow way to run a shop. It is also the only way we know to keep the price fair and the quality where we want it.

The name

Ritam comes from the Sanskrit ṛta — the order underlying things, the way something is properly done. It seemed right for objects made slowly, by hand, from stone.