How do you get the who’s who of the design world out on a Wednesday night in their best outfits? An old fashioned film premiere. That’s what brought editors, designers, and manufacturers together earlier this month at the historic Angelika East theater to view The Weight of It: Hermanx Reimagined, a short film by DLN partner ABC Stone which follows Mark Grattan’s creative process of translating his celebrated Hermanx table into marble.
Mark, a three-time Elle Decor A-List honoree and recent AD100 inductee, first developed Hermanx while living and working in Mexico City. Its name is a nod to gender fluidity, riffing on the Spanish for brother (hermano) and sister (hermana). Mark first produced Hermanx in wood, then adapted it to metal; his latest iteration, in collaboration with ABC Stone, is in marble harvested from a quarry in Vermont (the same one that provided stone for the DLN’s inaugural Community Impact Awards).
“Stone is something that actually scares me,” Mark confesses in the film. “The weight.” Yet, in partnership with ABC Stone, he discovered a love for the material. “Marble has a grain like wood, but also can polish like metal. So, we're getting this really fun hybrid of the two materials together.”
The film follows Mark—literally—into the quarry as he selects stone for the piece, but it also explores his evolution as a designer, from growing up in a small town, to hitting editorial success in New York, to struggling to make ends meet as a working creative. Alongside the harvesting and carving of monumental stone, this narrative takes on a special poignancy: there’s an undeniable weight to creative work. As Mark himself says, “I wouldn’t choose this s***.”
Ultimately, though, vulnerability becomes a necessity in the work, something that Mark learned while in Mexico. “There’s a softness that we all should embody a little bit more,” he reflects. “Mexico has this openness to accept a process.”
The Weight of It documents that process, showing how the designer’s journey is embedded in the objects he creates.
