Written by: Nayha Jehangir Khan
Posted on: September 16, 2022 | 
| 中文
Noon & Co
The artistic vision of Noon & Co begins with Taimoor Noon, whose personal journey took him on a road of rediscovery, exploring traditional handcrafted stonemasonry practices through the lens of contemporary design. He has fostered a growing community, comprising talented young artisans who are passionately reviving stone craft through the platform. They actively research and develop creative action plans to source a variety of stone spread across various parts of the country. The Noon & Co team meticulously seeks raw material and carefully transports them to their workshop studio where the artisans are located. Taimoor Noon is a nature enthusiast and an entrepreneur. He founded the platform as a way to bring together what he loved the most about the outdoors into an interior space. An everlasting design that can be brought into the home carrying centuries of time sealed into the layers of aged stone. Noon & Co’s ambitious undertaking of this tradition starts in ancient history where fossilised artefacts are associated with stone design functionality or ornamentation. The transformative design philosophy captures the spirit of handcrafted stone work and combines it with industrial rendering, using modern power hand tools that can achieve a monumental scale of luxury design.
Noon & Co
This endeavour to understand nature within the context of interior design requires careful examinations of the stone origin, formation, and its effects on the senses. The Noon & Co store display is calming, as it is located on the lower level of the constantly busy Wilsons Plaza in F-6 Markaz allowing you to leave behind the noise of traffic and crowds. The collection has a series of river stones and cornerstones sourced from natural quarries. Their signature design has been the basin that takes a solid block of stone, which is then precisely excavated by the artisan. The handling of such a heavy object requires mastery and technical perfection that is paramount at the Noon & Co artisan guild. The collection aims to provide a glimpse into the potential of diversification when using stone and other natural raw materials such as jute and copper offering lamps, candle stands, ashtrays and the traditionally recognisable mortar and pestle. The store opened in June 2022 and in a few months it has been able to deliver an absolute revolution in design philosophy. Taimoor Noon is clear about his vision in restoring environmental sustainability for the indegenious market of stone wear. Noon & Co elevate this ancient craft retaining the generational wisdom passed down from artisan to apprentice. The innovation of creativity compassionately preserves the authenticity of the craft by carefully producing a limited selection of designs. The handcrafted foundation of Noon & Co does not take help of mass producing tools like 3D printing or blasting to achieve their work. The effort to create handmade symmetry in stone designs is painstaking and meticulous and as a result, has become a fading art practice.
Noon & Co
The manufacturing of the collection visits hard to reach regions of Pakistan, starting from Balochistan to Gilgit−Baltistan. The deep dive into experimenting with the materiality of stone is done as a collective, where the process is extensively discussed in order to achieve micro manufacturing. The artisan identifies the threshold of the material, creates unity in the series of designs by selecting stone patterns and executes the design using a combination of tools. The interconnectedness of the material is ephemeral as the origin is seen as the untamable wild outdoors. What was once belonging to rough terrain, stone with jagged edges and decades of debris, taken from distant mines, is transformed into a fluid spherical earthly object through continuous sanding down and buffing techniques. The collection feels lyrical as there is a harmony of colour, minimalism and motifs throughout each piece. The metaphor carried throughout the Noon & Co design collection is of the scavenger who brings home a treasured piece found on a life changing exploration. It offers the chance to possess a fragment of time that is beyond our psychological grasp, the lifespace of natural stone can be up to 100 years. In today's era of living for fast gratification, the idea of a functional object used daily in our home and lasting a century can be viewed as something eternal. Noon & Co offers modern alchemy where the concept of history, nature and time are moulded into their contemporary objects holding together the outside world within reach of your home.
The process of making stone bowls at Noon & Co
You may also like:
