Follow along with this week's Milkshake as the founder of Sten Studio, José Miguel Schnaider, highlights the mystifying beauty of natural stone and reconnecting with earth.

In an increasingly digital world, organic materials become totems ? connections to a time we might remember as simpler, and better, and certainly more connected to the natural world. That tension ? between our digital-first lives and our increasingly stunted relationship between ourselves and nature ? powers José Miguel Schnaider?s work. As the founder and creative director of Sten Studio in Mexico City, he incorporates stone and crystal into furniture and decorative objects. ?The digital world will keep growing, and the way I see it is that stones or organic materials connect us with the essence of nature,? he says. ?Imagine that you live in a city where you cannot see green ? how can you connect with nature" Either you have plants or organic materials.? His furniture fits the bill. ??
In this week?s Milkshake, Schnaider shares how he works with stones, as well as his creative evolution from his earliest projects: ?I started coming up with the idea of making a coffee table made of obsidian and copper,? he says. ?I didn’t have that much [in the way] of drawing skills, so basically I used a PowerPoint presentation to start playing with the hexagons ? that’s how the shape of the honeycomb table came to life. Then I thought that I didn’t want to use brass as the main materi...