Style : Gardens : The New Stone Age

If Jay Griffith has his way, the wave of the future will be made of yesterday’s concrete, sawed, cracked and chopped into “ready-to-bear” shapes. The Venice-based landscape artist, already well-known for his outer-limits garden designs, has used recycled paving in his work for years--in walks, walls, drives and steps--but feels the time has come to get loud about it. Last year, he founded Venice Garden Furniture, a company specializing in made-to-order outdoor furnishings, many crafted of secondhand concrete. “It’s not as fashionable as slate,” Griffith says, “because people want polished, upscale surfaces. But concrete was good enough for the Romans, and in L.A. it’s our urban ore--a part of our past we shouldn’t be throwing in the dump.”

Griffith’s new business reflects his passion for rescuing pitched-out treasures, on project sites or elsewhere, and planting them in gardens with otherworldly results. Among its offerings are vintage California pottery, meticulous reproductions of French Art Nouveau and Spanish chairs, and tables that incorporate bits of old Malibu tile. But as striking as these are in plein-air settings, more eye-catching still are his own furniture creations, including the “Sofa de Concreto,” pieced together from a torn-up driveway.

These works are classic Griffith and speak volumes about his penchant for honoring history through a durable, unpretentious material. While his new pieces--priced from $300 to $3,000--currently range from simple planters to entire suites of rugged furniture, Griffith believes that the applications for his cherished medium are nearly unlimited. “I see concrete as stone, really,” he explains, “which can be used in any kind of garden--from the Byzantine to the ballistic.”