Rethinking Shell Waste

Navium Marine: Blue Mind Garden was designed around the restorative feeling of being near water. Rippled light, reflective water and coastal planting brought that atmosphere into a compact city balcony. Aylett Studio wanted the material underfoot to carry the same idea.

Working with waste oyster shells from Wright Brothers’ Borough Market restaurant, Aylett Studio developed Shellstone: a bespoke prototype that explored how a material from the water landscape could become part of the garden itself.

Each shell had been served to a restaurant guest the night before. Rather than buying a conventional cement tile, Aylett Studio transformed thousands of discarded oyster and mussel shells into a pale, textured floor with the material story left visible on its surface.

Installed as the floor of the balcony garden, the tiles brought the project’s wider themes — water, wellbeing and material care — underfoot. Their variations were not edited out: earth pigments brought a quiet range of sandy tones, while the exposed oyster and mussel shell gave the surface its mottled texture and small flashes of shimmer.

For the Blue Mind Garden, we explored how waste shells could be used to make the tiles underfoot. Oyster shells collected from Wright Brothers’ Borough Market restaurant were fired to produce quicklime, which formed the binder, while crushed oyster and mussel shells were combined with sand and earth pigments.

The making process became part of the design, allowing us to explore colour and texture through the material itself. We were particularly interested in the variations between the tiles: soft, sandy tones and exposed shell fragments that caught the light, connecting the floor to the garden’s coastal planting and water.