Galerie La Fayette, Paris. Lundhs natural stone. PHOTO BY MORTEN RAKKE
One of our most regular and trusted wholesale suppliers is Gerald Culliford of Kingston. They have recently begun to import granites under the Lundhs brand. In a sense, nothing has changed, as for years Lundh has owned a number of the key quarries in Scandinavia from which the Larvikite stones (eg Emerald Pearl and Blue Pearl) come, but the company is now marketing its stone in a fresh way, maintaining the mine’s own brand and quality control right through to the final use custinmer who selects the stone for their kitchen.
To allow Lundhs so give their own story, as they have it in their brouchure:
In 1910 a young Swedish man named Alfred Lundh came to Norway to run the Norwegian department for one of the biggest quarrying companies in the world at that time. Alfred Lundh then started the proud quarrying traditions that formed the basis of today’s company.
In 1962 Alfred’s grandson and 3rd generation quarry worker, Thor Lundh, decided to start his own quarrying company, Lundhs. After a couple of years of quarrying at his own expense – and that of the bank – things had not gone all that well. In 1961, he risked the last money he had borrowed on a daring manoeuvre.
He wanted to blast out the largest stone section ever blasted out by a block stone operator. The preparations took several weeks, and when they finally made the blast – it was a big success and a turning point for the company.
Thor continued the hard work with his high level of precision, and he revealed even more rich occurrences of the unique materials that we still solely supply. He restructured the quarry operation totally, going from manual labour to machine operations. Thor also began exporting worldwide, and today Lundhs are still building on the good relations started back in the 1960’s.
Today Thor-Anders Lundh Hakestad, 5th generation of the Lundh family, is the CEO of the company. He started his career working in the quarries in Norway, and later in the stone processing industry in France and Italy. Thor-Anders has a strong commitment of developing Lundhs further — ensuring the same passion for precision and quality as in generations before.
“The history of Lundhs started more than 100 years ago. Throughout this time, innovation has been essential. The use of natural stone has changed completely. The method of extracting has changed completely. Lundhs has always been in the forefront of these changes. Now we want to change the way of promoting natural stone towards the end user: We will take the step of transforming Lundhs products from a commodity to a strong brand. We hope you will be inspired when you have a closer look at the LUNDHS Real Stone concept – promoting natural stone in a new way.”
