Designers Are Rediscovering the Decorative Potential of Eggshells

This article is part of our Design special section about how food inspires designers to make and do surprising things.

While you were clucking over the price of eggs, Mark de la Vega was devouring them by the dozen — 300 dozen in the last six months. But not as omelets. Mr. de la Vega, a designer in Brooklyn, produces panels and furnishings ornamented with eggshell lacquer.

The finish originated with East Asian artisans, who embedded shell fragments from duck or chicken eggs into the surfaces of decorative art pieces as a substitute for white pigment. In the early 20th century, the Swiss-born Art Deco craftsman Jean Dunand bartered his metalworking skills to learn the technique, also known as coquille d’oeuf, from a Japanese expert visiting Paris. According to the art historian Félix Marcilhac, Mr. Dunand was the first to use tweezers to apply crushed shells to produce a “white craquelure effect.”

“When you see it in person, it is just candy,” said John Gachot, an interior designer who worked on the former West Village home of the fashion designer Marc Jacobs. Mr. Gachot was referring to Mr. Jacobs’s circa-1925 Dunand side table, which sold at Sotheby’s in 2019 for $131,250 (the high estimate was $120,000).

Almost exactly a century after the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the show that gave Art Deco its name, opened in Paris, Mr. Dunand’s legacy continues. In January, the British company de Gournay unveiled Dunand, a gilded silk wallpaper whose angular, speckled pattern and brassy sheen allude to his metalwork and his eggshells.

With glitzy, geometry-loving Deco re-emerging in contemporary home furnishings, the technique is proliferating.

Mr. de la Vega’s eggshell millwork can be found in a New York City pied-à-terre and an entryway closet in an Aspen, Colo., condo — both projects of Kaitlyn Payne, the principal of Basicspace, an interior design studio, in Portland, Maine.

Ms. Payne pitched the relative rarity of the decorative finish, assuring her client that she wouldn’t find eggshells saturating her Instagram. “This is something that is handmade and translates as such,” she said. “It’s almost like you’re buying an art piece.” And at $450 a square foot, you kind of are.

De La Vega Designs also produces a mirror collection, called Jules, rimmed in patterns of champagne bubbles, conga lines of triangles and unraveling checkerboards created by the meticulous positioning of shell shards.

The British-born designer Alexander Lamont, who is based in Thailand, first sold items that he described as looking like “a sort of miniature shattered porcelain” in 2005. Four years later, he brought an expert from France to train his artisans to produce coquille d’oeuf pieces in house in Bangkok, which were officially introduced in 2012. Among the results were the company’s Pleiades vessels embellished with solar nebula, constellations and moon craters in eggshell and abalone.

Each Pleiades vessel takes up to 50 hours to fabricate and is priced from $2,000 to $8,000, depending on the design’s intricacy. A patchwork-pattern cabinet the company recently produced as a one-off required 350 hours for the eggshell application, followed by 320 hours to apply and sand five layers of lacquer.

Warawadee Hemaratna, a marketing executive for Alexander Lamont, declined to disclose the cabinet’s price for publication, but said the company sells 40 to 60 eggshell pieces each year.

Other applications are less rarefied.

Dilara Kan Hon and Bodin Hon, the founders of Yellowdot, a design studio in Hong Kong and Istanbul, began working with eggshells while sitting out the pandemic in Turkey. Undertaking projects that minimized food waste, they saw “quiet beauty and potential” in the material’s light, translucent characteristics, said Mr. Hon, who has a background in bioengineering.

The couple set the shell fragments in resin to create a flat disk, which they suspended by cables to make a light fixture with a mesmerizing pattern.

“There are so many different ways to cook an egg, but no one ever thinks about the eggshell,” said Ms. Kan Hon, who studied fine art and interior design. They have blatantly called attention to it by affixing a brass tag to the hanging lamp announcing that it was created with 63 eggs; a room divider boasts of incorporating 480 of them.

Tina Scepanovic, a New York City artist, began working with eggshell lacquer seven years ago while studying at the Isabel O’Neil Studio on the Upper East Side. Some pieces in her Gobstopper series — grids of jawbreaker-like spheres arranged on a wall panel — have textured surfaces created by broken shells glued in place, then embedded in lacquer. For another Gobstopper, she used vinegar to strip the color from brown eggshells, turning them pink, and set the pieces in Venetian plaster.

“It is fascinating how eggshells are simultaneously fragile yet incredibly resilient,” Ms. Scepanovic said. “Eggs contain calcium carbonate, the same mineral found in marble, so in a sense, they are just thin sheets of marble. They also seem to resist abrasion, and sanding them by hand is a real workout.”

She played around with grinding the shells, giving up after finding the results lackluster. But Caleb Engstrom, a designer in Los Angeles, has gone full throttle with his coffee grinder.

For his limited-edition Special Damages dining chair, he glued dozens of crushed brown eggshells to one of the legs. The sand-paper-like texture is not “in your face,” he said, but invites a closer look at an unexpected detail. Though he applied a clear sealant to fix the granules, Mr. Engstrom warned that they tend to slough off.

“It’s not for everyone,” he said of the Special Damages chair, which will be on view May 17-19 at the JONALDDUDD conceptual design show during New York Design Week, in a new fair, Shelter, on West 26th Street in Manhattan.