This week at Dutch Design Week 2015, Jasper Rombouts gives a new perspective on this material with ‘Lava Wellness,’ a collection of tiles for wellness architecture. This collection features six different designs showing different applications for basalt, a design material that gets stronger every time you recycle it. A stand out from the collection was a coffee table surface made from these tiles.

Strong, sophisticated and sustainable, basalt is in many ways an overlooked design material. Rombouts presents basaltic lava as the ‘new’ sustainable material: “I want to show the industrial design world what this widely available and very cheap material can do,” he explains.

Basalt is used in large quantities, for example in railroad constructions, roads or dams. A special quality of this rock is that it can be melted and re-melted endlessly without producing any waste. By experimenting with different melting and moulding techniques, Jasper has proved its potential for more sophisticated functions.