Stone-Ideas.com 
Natural stone and jewelry are not an easy match, as is well known. This is usually because marble, onyx, etc., while beautiful, elegant, and valuable, always carry a certain weight. Many jewelry designers have attempted this with limited success – now the Italian company Budri has approached the subject from a completely different angle.
“Budri is the atelier for haute couture in marble, ‘Alta Sartoria del Marmo’“ says US architect Eric Carlson of Carbondale about the current collection he designed for the Italian company. “Thanks to its exceptional expertise and craftsmanship in handling this noble material, I was able to bring this extraordinary collection to life – true ‘works of art.“
The idea behind the collection called “Charme“ is incredibly simple: If it’s not easy to make a necklace, ring, or bracelet out of stone, then perhaps you can break these pieces of jewelry down into their individual components and create something special out of them.
Furniture jewelry, perhaps?
The concept goes back to an old idea by Alessandra Malagoli Budri, the company’s art director and, together with her husband Gian Marco, the leader of the company, which can safely be described as “famous.“ At the presentation of the collection at the Milan Furorisalone 2025 in the company’s showroom, she casually mentioned that she had designed a stone ring a long time ago in a different context, but it had never gone into production.
Now, Eric Carlson has fully exploited the possibilities opened up to his creativity by Budri – namely, that one can create tables with very different bases or even consoles from beads (read: spheres), chains (read: movable links), or bracelets (read: rectangles).
Budri contributed magnificent types of stone and meticulously crafted them, making these pieces of furniture a joy to look at or sit around.
The highly polished surface gives the stones used as table legs their shine.
A complement to the materials: The glass of the tabletop is also something special: extra clear and, while visible at normal glance, only as a kind of cloud, not as an object.
And: A real necklace always has a clasp, but you can’t see it – with “Charme,“ this corresponds to the fact that the individual pieces are also joined together without you being able to see how.
We’d like to point out three things:
* The highlight of the collection in the showroom was a fascinating inlay work for the wall with a black necklace in the foreground, its gray shadow behind it, and many brownish necklaces as a background;
* Budri has now achieved so much artistic freedom that it is allowed to play around with things, such as the dollhouses in the showroom windows. They display the stone jewelry in miniature. Perhaps there is even a market for such things – in a report a while ago, we took a look inside the dollhouse of the British Queen Mary (see link below);
* And then there is a personal little thing, namely a marble necklace, but with a marble pendant featuring a portrait of the two Budris (photo at the bottom).
