About Us
About Us
Kia ora and welcome.
We are Mia and Sara, a mother-daughter duo from the West Coast of Te Wai Pounamu, the South Island of New Zealand. We are second and third generation collectors and carvers of taonga, hand-crafted from the beautiful and precious stones found in the rivers and on the beaches of our homeland.
While many carvers exclusively work with pounamu or nephrite jade, we love to explore the many different minerals and ‘forgotten stones’ of our wild and wonderful coastline and frequently work with schist, serpentinite, greywacke, and jasper, as well as rarer varieties such as rhodonite and aotea. All of our stones are collected by hand on our journeys along the coastline and throughout the South Island.
Our Story
Our story began with Mia’s father, Peter Tennant. PT, as the locals knew him, was a skilled and highly respected pounamu carver from Greymouth on the West Coast. When PT passed away, his tools and collection of stones were inherited by Mia, who taught herself to carve and began to add to the collection with stones foraged from her garden and nearby beaches. It was these forgotten and overlooked stones that formed the foundation of what Simply Stone is today, and it is their hidden beauty that Mia looks to highlight with each piece she carves. Mia continues to work from her studio on the West Coast, transforming simple stones into striking taonga with the tools inherited from her father, and cherishing the magic of the raw materials that Paptūānuku delivers to her.
Sara joined the business in 2019 and handles the photography, marketing and sales of Simply Stone pieces, travelling to markets throughout New Zealand accompanied by her white shepherd Nova. When she isn’t travelling Sara lives in Wanaka, where she works out of a home studio, finding time to carve and carry on the tradition that began with her grandfather.
Although their lives are mostly spent apart, Mia and Sara take time every few months to embark on rock hunting expeditions together and find the little pieces of magic hiding throughout the South Island.
