The chapel was white. All of it, except the windows and the wood, which were very dark. That happens with rooms that nobody ever finished designing. They stand there honestly enough, and there is nothing for the eye to catch on.

A church in Bridgeport, Connecticut, telephoned the workshop Canning Liturgical Arts and asked it to imagine what its small Padre Pio Eucharistic Adoration Chapel could become. The deadline was named at once: by Christmas. That left about two months for the design and the decoration of the whole space.

They began, the workshop says, with pencil and watercolour. Work started once the client had approved the sketch.

The client, in the workshop’s words, wanted a place of quiet prayer, an “antidote to the neglected city outside”. The solution proved simple in structure. From the entrance to the altar the walls are the same warm ochre, but the closer to the sanctuary, the more refined the decoration becomes. The stars on the ceiling grow denser in the same way. In the sanctuary the space is wrapped in blue with silver leaf. The pattern there is an original one: three crossed nails, a sign of the Crucifixion and of Padre Pio’s stigmata.

Now to the stone. The altar in this chapel is plaster, painted to look like Carrara marble, and the workshop says so plainly.

We read this without a smile. Painting in imitation of marble is a craft in its own right, and a good craftsman does it so well that the hand reaches out to check. What is telling here is something else: there is no marble in the altar, and yet it was depicted all the same. People find it hard to imagine an altar without stone.

A real slab differs in one respect. It weighs what it weighs. So the stone for an altar table is worth thinking about at the drawing stage, together with the base and the floor that will carry that weight.