Stefano Ricci SR Octagonal Ashtray — Walnut Root / Palladium

Stefano Ricci SR Octagonal Ashtray — Walnut Root / Palladium

The distinction between walnut timber and walnut root is the distinction between a predictable material and an exceptional one. Walnut timber — the straight-grained wood from the trunk — is consistent, workable, and beautiful in its own right. Walnut root is what forms below the ground, at the junction of trunk and root system, where the wood compresses and twists under the mechanical demands of holding a tree upright in soil: the grain tightens into dense, swirling figures, the color deepens, the cellular structure becomes irregular in ways that produce extraordinary visual complexity when sliced and finished. It is slower to work than straight-grained timber and less predictable — the figure reveals itself only when the piece is cut, and no two pieces cut from the same root will be identical.

Stefano Ricci builds the octagonal ashtray body from this material. At 20 cm across the diagonal, the form is large enough that the full complexity of the root grain is visible in a single object: the pattern readable from across a room as richly figured wood, and readable up close as a dense, almost topographic surface with depth and movement that flat-grained timber cannot produce.

Walnut Root

Walnut root at this scale is an object with genuine material presence — the warmth of the wood, the complexity of the grain, and the weight of a dense piece of root burl all contributing to a piece that occupies a desk or bar surface differently from porcelain or crystal glass. The finish of the walnut root surface is what separates a luxury object from a raw material: the grain sealed and protected, the figure brought to the surface without obscuring it, the color allowed to read in its full tonal range from pale yellow-brown in the lighter passages to near-black in the deepest parts of the figure.

Palladium Details

The palladium details — hardware and cigar rests in the cool silver-white metal — are the exact right pairing for walnut root. Gold against wood is warm on warm; palladium against walnut root is a deliberate temperature contrast, the cool of the metal drawing out the warmth of the wood rather than merging with it. Palladium is the more restrained of the two hardware choices available across the SR accessory range, and restraint is what walnut root — a material that makes its own statement — requires of its hardware.

Now available at The Tobacconist of Greenwich.