Limestone soap dishes — what we learned in Mġarr

The stone soap dish is one of our smallest pieces. A 12×8×2cm slab of Maltese limestone, hand-cut in a Mġarr workshop. €28.

The reason we sell it: limestone is mildly absorbent. A bar of olive-oil soap sat on a glass or steel dish dies in three weeks because the bar sits in its own dissolution puddle. On a limestone dish, the puddle gets wicked away — the bar lasts about five weeks.

We didn't know any of this when we started. The reason we have a Maltese limestone soap dish at all is that I have a friend who runs a stone-cutting workshop in Mġarr (mostly headstones and worktops), and one day I asked him whether limestone offcuts would work as soap dishes. He cut me three from offcuts and gave them to me to test.

Three months later one of the dishes had a faint dark stain from the soap on it. Three months after that, the stain had become a uniform warm patina that I liked. Three years on, all of mine look like that.

That's the case for the limestone — it lasts (it's stone), it makes the soap last, and it changes appearance with use in a way that I find appealing.

What we learned: don't over-engineer it. The dish is just a slab. We don't carve a drainage channel because the stone does the draining. We don't glaze it because the glaze would defeat the absorbency. We don't polish the back because the rough surface grips the counter.

Some products want to be left alone.

Mateo