French Antique Limestone Well

A French antique limestone well, a stone wellhead in three heavy curved segments that join to form a deep circular basin. The stone is pale buff and warm cream, marked with smoke-gray mineral deposits and sun-faded patches on a gritty exterior. A dark iron crank frame is mounted directly into the rim and carries a weather-beaten wooden drum, which gives the low stone base a tall architectural line.

It measures 59 1/2 inches in diameter and 34 inches high to the stone rim, nearly five feet across. The surface is heavily textured with small pits and old chips, and the corners of the wide rim have been rounded by decades of weather. Inside, the basin keeps vertical tool marks that throw sharp shadows. The iron is dark and oxidized; the drum is dry and cracked with age. It is a 19th-century piece.

A well of this scale anchors the center of a courtyard or the crossing of two garden axes, and the frame and drum give it a vertical presence that a trough does not have. It can be plumbed as a recirculating fountain or left as it is. The stone wellhead is in our yard in Marina Del Rey; come and see it, or ask us for photographs and a delivered price.