Elipse White Marble Small

Founded in 2015, Casa Mineral is a Mexican design house that produces contemporary home accessories from marble to create a luxurious and sensory experience. Casa Mineral’s master stone cutters and craftsmen select and hand-tool every piece, using simple forms and lines to accentuate the character of the stone. 

The long history of humans living and working with stone informs the vision of founders Maritza Lara Cáceres and Daniel Cruz Maldonado, who met when they were 17 years old. The company reflects their shared experiences in interior design management and understanding of how to create spaces as sanctuaries for a peaceful and positive life. The pieces imagined by Lara Cáceres and Cruz Maldonado for Casa Mineral are inspired by the natural world, childhood memories of warmth and togetherness and their travels. 

Lara Cáceres is an architect who has been part of the faculty of the School of Architecture at UNAM and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville. She is also the former director of Capital Studio, a firm that specializes in interior remodeling. Cruz Maldonado is the former director of Cotidiano, an interior design firm specializing in turnkey projects.

Seeing what design firms and architects like Menu, Karimoku New Standard and Vincent Van Duysen have done in other parts of the world, they turned their eyes towards the incredible talents of Latin America. Lara Cáceres and Cruz Maldonado established a Mexico City design showroom, Casa Quieta, in 2018. It features Casa Mineral products as well as complementary modern furniture and contemporary decorative objects by Latin American designers.

Casa Mineral has been featured in Architectural Digest Mexico, Elle Decoration, Chic Haus and Design Week Mexico. 

Find Casa Mineral tables, tableware, decorative objects and other furniture on 1stDibs.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.