Stone Boutique PIX in news file

A new stone showroom, called the Stone Boutique, is being opened on Cricklewood Broadway, Westhampstead, in north London next month by Mega Marble, a company started in 1996 by Rafi Mimoni.

Rafi says he decided to open a showroom to distinguish Mega Marble from the plethora of one-man-and-a-labourer operations he has seen spring up around London in the past two or three years. He felt the best way to do that was to put on display the work that Mega Marble can produce.

And the north London showroom could be just the first. Rafi says he would like to have a showroom in all four corners of London - north, south, east and west.

The 300m2 Westhampstead showroom, aimed primarily at architects, interior designers and developers, includes four room sets designed by Rafi as well as slabs and tiles, mostly of Spanish stone but with some exotics like onyx and lapis lazuli.

There are also UK limestones from Derbyshire and Portland and sandstone from Yorkshire. Rafi says architects specify it so he stocks it, although he complains it is harder to get hold of than imported stone.

Much of the stone he has used in the showroom, like much of the stone he uses on projects, comes from Stephen Pike\'s stone wholesale business of The Marble & Granite Centre in Rickmansworth.

The roomsets include stone floors, some composed of standard module tiles and others that are hand cut from slabs. And there are solid and built up stone baths, basins and shower trays, because Mega Marble do not just produce granite worktops.

When they started, most of their work was kitchen worktops but Rafi, once a potter, says: "I got very bored with them." He wanted to exercise his design flair, so he branched out into bathrooms, which today account for half his business.

Like a good many stone companies in the interiors market, the Stone Boutique range does include man-made materials, in this case Zodiaq Quartz from DuPont, Mega Marble having lately become approved fabricators and installers of Zodiaq.

Rafi started his own business after coming to the UK from Israel in order to stay with the woman who is now his wife. He worked as a fixer for kitchen worktop companies before setting up Mega Marble in a single factory unit in West Hampstead. Today he employs 26 people, including Alan Davis, his factory manager, and other masons from the now defunct but respected London masonry company of Geoffrey Pike. He has five teams of fixers out in vans, one of them just producing templates.

Rafi says: "I am thrilled to be opening a showroom, only 10 minutes away from our factory. I am passionate about stone in all its forms and I really feel this showroom shows off some of the fantastic ideas in natural stone that can be turned into reality.

"Hopefully, visitors to the showroom will share my enthusiasm and allow us to help and advise them with their natural stone needs. All the displays have been designed in-house and we are always delighted to assist clients with their design concepts."