The Voussoir collection for Kallista starts before designer Richard T. Anuszkiewicz touches anything. Each sink is carved directly from a single block of stone, which means the veining runs uninterrupted from one surface to the next, and no two pieces ever come out quite the same. The apron front is shaped with curves that feel closer to built architecture than to anything you’d find in a kitchen showroom.
Kallista’s Voussoir collection takes its name from the wedge-shaped stones used to construct arches and vaults. Stone has been used for sinks for centuries, but Voussoir revisits the material through the lens of contemporary cabinetry, proportion, and scale.
Richard has spent his career making the case that the kitchen deserves to be taken as seriously as any other room in a well-designed home. His design practice, Raith Design, spans interiors, cabinetry, luxury automobiles, and yachts, and he has served as creative director for Monogram, GE’s luxury appliance brand, where he designed multiple award-winning installations at the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show (KBIS). The thread connecting all of it is a conviction that objects in a space should feel permanent and purposeful rather than decorative. Voussoir is the most direct expression of that thinking he has produced.
In Fusion Green Quartzite, the collection takes on an entirely different character, with dramatic movement that makes the stone feel almost geological.
“For me, Voussoir is about creating something timeless juxtaposed in relevancy,” says Richard. “An object that feels carved from history but is designed for today. This sink is an exploration of balance between architecture and art, warmth and strength, heritage, and innovation.”
The collection’s stone selection covers a range of intentions. White Carrara, Nero Marquina, and Crema Marfil offer versatility and a certain enduring legibility. The designer-curated options, Calacatta Viola, Macchia Vecchia, and Fusion Green Quartzite, move further into color and movement, materials that carry their own character before anyone has touched them. The collection is available in two configurations: a 24-inch butler sink and a 36-inch apron-front sink intended to anchor the kitchen by sheer scale.
In a kitchen increasingly defined by appliances and technology, Voussoir makes a case for the enduring appeal of a beautifully worked piece of stone.
The name is also borrowed from architecture. A voussoir is a wedge-shaped stone used to construct arches and vaults, each block cut to lock against the next so the whole thing holds without mortar. It is a form that has been doing the same job for centuries, in Roman aqueducts and Romanesque cathedrals alike.
Stone sinks are the oldest kind there is, but the single block is a modern move. Medieval European households washed in troughs hacked out of limestone or volcanic rock. By 1900 the American standard was soapstone quarried in Vermont and Virginia and mass-produced for brownstones, rowhouses, and factory floors. Those sinks were rarely monolithic. They were glued up from five flat panels, because sawing slabs was cheap and hollowing a block was not, and Vermont Soapstone still builds them that way by the hundreds every year. Enameled cast iron and fireclay eventually pushed stone out of the kitchen, lighter and cheaper and easier to sell to a public worried about germs. Voussoir’s 24-inch butler configuration is named for the fireclay sink that beat it.
Every surface throughout the collection is hand finished and every curve is a consequence of the material rather than something applied to it, according to the company. Richard’s background in millwork and cabinetry is legible throughout in the way the sink reads as a permanent fixture from the moment it lands in a room.
