MINE(ral) is a minimalist copper furniture collection located in Lisbon, Portugal, designed by Studio Gameiro for ST VINCENTS. Most of what surrounds us begins in the dark. The raw minerals that become tools, surfaces, and objects come out of the ground through work that few of us ever picture, done by people who stay largely invisible to the rooms their material eventually furnishes. MINE(ral) takes that overlooked origin as its subject, translating the geology of extraction into four domestic pieces that carry the memory of where the copper came from.

The collection grew out of fieldwork at the Boliden Neves-Corvo mine in Portugal’s Alentejo, a working site on the Iberian pyrite belt rich in zinc and copper. Studio Gameiro filmed the operation less as documentary than as a hunt for surface. The tunnel walls hold strata that shift between the aleatory and the grid-like, marked further by the incidental scoring of miners’ lamps, hand tools, and heavy machinery moving material below and above ground. Those readings became the source grammar for the patina. Dutch designer Nick Valentijn worked that grammar onto sheet copper over weeks of hand corrosion and scratching until the metal reads as excavated rather than manufactured. The studio had already established a working fluency with the material through CLAM, its earlier copper lamp series, and before that in a bespoke furniture line cut from pure rock salt in the Algarve. Copper here is not a finish choice so much as a continuation.

Valentijn’s method gives the collection its particular tension. A 2024 graduate of the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design, he draws in a single continuous line, spare and close to automatic, then builds directly from the drawing with almost no gap between the two acts. The line moves onto the metal, which he cuts, welds, and assembles freehand. Proportions are felt rather than measured, irregularities survive, and nothing gets discarded. That refusal to correct is what keeps the pieces from tipping into decorative pastiche. The armchair (L90 x W85 x H68cm) sits heavy and blunt, its patinated planes closer to a hewn block than an upholstered seat. The standing lamp rises to 170 centimeters as a tapering conical shard, its bioresin shade glowing warm against the mottled copper body, a form that recalls a mine headframe as much as a floor light.