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Portraits Valerie Easton

Richard Rhodes | His fate is cast in stone

Richard Rhodes is a stonemason and entrepreneur who talks of buying up threatened Chinese villages as eloquently as he does about sculpting the 60-ton granite wave at the Tacoma Art Museum. He travels the globe in search of stone to recycle; he's also the father of five daughters under the age of 11. I spoke with Rhodes at his stone-lined office in Seattle's Madison Valley.

Q: What's the difference between rock and stone?

A: Rock is the raw, natural material; stone has been touched, worked, wrought by humans.

Q: Why use stone in the garden?

A: Stone is the skeleton of a garden. It's a legacy material — it'll outlast us all. Stone improves with human interaction, and you can say that of very few materials.

Q: Why and how does someone in the modern world become a stonemason?

A: When I was in grad school in London, studying medieval drama, I heard about a labor guild in Italy that traced its roots back to the great cathedral builders of Europe. I went to Italy, became an apprentice and was the first foreigner in 726 years to be initiated into the freemasons. I worked so hard I lost 35 pounds.

Q: How did you end up in Seattle?

A: Because it's a wood culture here, I thought there'd be a good market for stone, and that proved true.

Q: Why all this stone from China I keep seeing in gardens?

A: Stone has been recycled since the dawn of time. "Spoila" is the word for it; the spoils of war. My first purchase was a 500-year-old road in the Pearl River Delta in Southern China. It had no value in that culture; the old roads are bumpy to ride your bike on. I've bought 17 Chinese villages in their entirety and put people to work taking them apart. I only buy what is going to be destroyed, in this case by the Three Gorges Dam. Q: Is anyone else doing this?

A: I've kind of invented a whole industry. I believe we're the largest antique-stone purchaser in the world.

Q: How much time are you away from home?

A: I travel a third to a half of the time. Which is hard in the developing world. Here I think of myself as a young man (Rhodes is 46), but in China I feel ancient because they respectfully call me the "Father of the Antique Stone Business."

Q: How often do you make it home to see your daughters?

A: Two sets of twins, and no other twins in the family anywhere. I have a strict rule to always be home on the weekend.

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