An “outrageous” beach house on the French side of the Caribbean island St. Martin needed an anything-but-usual outdoor table. Jeff Kudrick of JM Lifestyles had previously worked on a large Lavacrete rock feature for the homeowner’s Long Island, New York, home, and he liked it so much he wanted a Lavacrete table as well.
Lavacrete is the company’s name for concrete with so many fiber-optic cables embedded in it that the light seems to flow. “It looks like lava flowing through the cracks in the top,” explains Kudrick. “We create a void that we fill with a translucent material and individually place the fibers, then fill it.”
Kudrick originally created a room filled with large fish tanks next to an indoor pool in the man’s Long Island basement. A grotto from outside connected to the pool, and the food service area next to the grotto contained Lavacrete bar tops.
This 4-by-14-foot table utilizes the company’s limestone texture with 15,000 pinpoints of light set in by hand. “The limestone texture is one of our products we call Coraline because it replicates the limestone you would see in Florida and the Caribbean,” Kudrick says.
The table’s base is 3/16-inch stainless-steel panels on a stainless-steel frame. Because of the number of voids required to place so many fiber optics, the concrete mix requires reinforcement with basalt rebar acquired through Infinicrete. The table is sealed with SureCrete’s XS-327 water-based sealer. The fiber-optic illuminators are DMX controlled, so whatever color is shining through the table matches the color of lighting emitted around the entire property.
“This was a crazy job,” says Kudrick. “Everybody was speaking French when we were installing the table. It’s delicate but it’s also a giant table. No matter how light you make it, it’s still heavy and it has all these fragile optics sticking out of it. We had to use forklifts and lifts when we were moving it because we didn’t have enough guys and we were limited on equipment. It was so hectic trying to get that piece in without anything happening to it, but it turned out beautifully.”
www.jmlifestyles.com
