In a New Documentary, Mark Grattan Embarks on an Artistic Journey
Executive produced by ABC Stone, The Weight of It: Hermanx Reimagined follows the Galerie Creative Mind designer on an emotional adventure as he translates one of his best-known furnishings into a one-of-a-kind marble sculpture
Like many creative visionaries, furniture designer Mark Grattan prefers to let his work speak for itself. In many cases, it does so effortlessly. Plush beds wrapped in rosy velvets and polished chrome exude louche glamour and unabashed sensuality; brown lacquered desks with drooping legs tease the eye. Yet the man behind those alluring pieces, which have landed in the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian’s permanent collections, has long guarded a far more private side. “I’m someone who is often misunderstood in real life,” explains Grattan, who struck out on his own after helming Mexico City furniture studio Vidivixi for eight years and now runs a mostly one-man operation in Brooklyn. “The truth is, I have a hard time showing affection even in my closest relationships. It isn’t what’s happening inside, but it’s the version of me that people get.”
His presence on camera, however, reveals a strikingly different side—as viewers of Ellen’s Next Great Designer quickly discovered in 2021. After narrowly escaping elimination early in the competition, a determined Grattan clawed his way through the season and ultimately emerged victorious. So when Lyndsey Belle Tyler, creative director of ABC Stone, offered to help him transform his Hermanx Table into marble and document the process on film, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. “I said yes without overthinking it,” he tells Galerie. “Film gives me something the physical world can’t. On camera, you’re exposed more than you’ve ever been, and somehow, I feel so safe. I can say things that I can’t access in any other room.”
Perhaps that explains why the documentary, called The Weight of It: Hermanx Reimagined, struck such a chord when it premiered to a packed house of design enthusiasts at Village East by Angelika in April. Conceived and produced by ABC Stone and shot by Julie Florio and Mica Spicka, the film traces the transformation of Grattan’s iconic Hermanx Table into marble while revealing an unusually candid portrait of a singular artist reckoning with creative vulnerability, the pressure to constantly innovate, and the challenge of returning to a widely recognized work. “When we set out to make The Weight of It: HermanX Reimagined, we thought we were making a film about a table,” Tyler says. “Mark, generously and stubbornly, made sure we made a film about an artist on a journey instead.”
“Design is often perceived as polished and resolved, but the reality is much messier,” Grattan admits. “Working with stone for the first time sparked a level of fear and uncertainty I hadn’t experienced in years. The documentary captures that rawness, including moments of doubt, the pressure to honor the material, and the emotional weight of revisiting a design that has been part of my life for so long. It was uncomfortable at times, but also incredibly honest and freeing.”
Grattan first conceived the Hermanx Table after being captivated by antique dowel tables he encountered at Mexico City’s La Lagunilla market. Subsequent iterations pushed the original silhouette into more fluid territory, as the cylindrical elements bent into looping, chainlike curves that Grattan describes in the documentary as having “sinister” qualities. The composition relies on repetition: a single S-shaped component interlocks with itself to create a hypnotic structure that appears to knot into itself. “It’s literally just one identical shape, that S, woven together, but it looks like 5,000 shapes,” Grattan explains in the film before characterizing the breakthrough with disarming candor. “When you’re high on the computer and just f***ing around, sometimes things hit and sometimes they don’t. But in that moment, something massively clicked.” He first realized the table in wood, then in gleaming brass, before embarking on the marble edition.
Doing so required venturing deep into ABC Stone’s Vermont quarries, an experience Grattan describes as profoundly humbling. “The quarry is massive, physically intimidating in a way that’s hard to describe until you’re standing inside it,” recalls the designer, who had never visited a quarry before. “That was the real experience: being there at all, looking up, and feeling small.” He ultimately selected a cut of Fantastico Danby marble, whose stormy gray-and-white veining courses across the table’s looping tubular elements. Hand-carved into interlocking links, the substantial volumes frame generous voids that lend the dense stone an unexpected levity. A sharply detailed glass vitrine rests above the sculptural base, allowing the marble’s swirling surface and meticulous carving to command full attention.
“I’ve made this table in different forms more times than I can count, and after enough iterations you stop seeing your own work clearly,” admits Grattan, who entrusted ABC Stone’s fabricators with producing the one-of-a-kind, 450-pound table. “Watching my own design come back to me in stone, in a material I’ve never worked in, executed by someone else, let me see it again for the first time. The stone gives it a weight and presence the wood and metal versions never had, but the real gift was getting to see my own work through someone else’s hands.”
The film unlocked a newfound openness in Grattan—a shift in perspective that arrives at a key moment as he plans to debut his own furniture showroom this summer. Called “Lived In,” the venture will occupy his Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone and present an even more personal expression of his creative world. He’s in the process of building it out, though the undertaking already holds deep emotional heft. “Some of the most meaningful things I’ve made have come from corners I had to build my way out of,” he says. “This new vision has a mind of its own and is transforming into something deeper and more vulnerable than I had planned. It’s growing on its own. In some ways, it’s also just the formal name for something I’ve been doing for years.”