NEW YORK (AP) It looks like a marble floor in a New Jersey apartment building.
It’s not.
The marble was placed there by a man who paid $400,000 for the space and a new kitchen table.
It’s the first marble in New York City’s history that’s been made from natural marble, and it could change the way New Yorkers eat and shop for years to come.
“I just really thought it was a cool idea,” said Joe Mabel, who owns the Marbled Porcelain Company in Queens.
“I was like, ‘Man, this is the greatest idea.'”
Mabel, now in his 80s, had a vision to make marble for his family’s apartment, so he built it himself.
“It took a lot of work, a lot and a lot, but I think I did it,” he said.
The kitchen table was made from 1.5 inches of pure white marble, with the rest of the flooring, a marble bar, and a marble shelf.
It was placed at the top of a marble dining table, which is the only one in the building that is free of marble.
The Marbled Ceramic Co., based in South Burlington, Vermont, was able to secure a $400 million financing for the project from a New Orleans bank that specializes in building homes and office buildings.
It is now a full-service company that has a permanent home in Manhattan.
“We’re a private company, but we do have a full team of engineers and we’re working with a marble supplier,” said Steve Ticke, a senior vice president at Marbled.
“The marble supplier’s name is Marble.”
“We have about 50 employees,” he added.
“It’s not just marble.”
Marble will make a home in the basement of a building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but it won’t be a marble-covered kitchen table for the next 20 years.
It will, instead, be a table for a fireplace.
Mabel plans to display the marble on a wall.
“The first thing we want to do is to have it put on the mantelpiece of a family member, but the marble has to be on a marble wall,” he explained.
“When it’s finished, we’ll have a marble fireplace in the home.”
A family friend and longtime marble aficionado, Bob O’Donnell, has also donated the marble to the company.
O’Donnell has been a marble collector for decades, having built a collection of about 50 pieces, mostly from Italy and Italy’s past.
He bought about 50 of the pieces and brought them to the Marbles in Vermont, where the company plans to use them in a fireplace in a newly built condo.
“He is very good about putting things up in his home,” Mabel said.
“And so we’re going to put them on the wall.”
A fireplace in Marbled’s new building.MELEDON’s new home is expected to be complete in 2020.
Mabel hopes to open it for regular use by 2021.
A fireplace, the first in Marmented’s new Manhattan building.
Marbled will also donate marble to a number of museums around the world, including a new marble exhibit in the United Kingdom’s Royal Botanic Gardens.