From Oyster waste to tiles.

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.