Brazil Meets the American Riviera

The love story behind Forte Stone’s Santa Barbara success…

Photos and story by Carly Otness

Some businesses are born out of an idea followed by a strategy and perhaps a business plan. Forte Stone was born out of a love story, a case of mistaken identity, and the kind of gut feeling you can’t ignore.

Back in the mid-90s, Rachel Forte, an exchange student from Vitória, Brazil, was hanging out at Butterfly Beach when she bumped into John Tuttle, who was out playing soccer with friends. He stopped the game to say hello. Two years later, the couple sat in a hotel lobby in Brazil with her father, planning their wedding.

That was when a man, who just happened to be from Rachel’s hometown, mistook John for a Canadian marble dealer and started pitching stones. Granite, marble, quartzite—slabs as tall as walls, peeled straight from the earth.  He even followed them into the dining room and sat down while they were meeting with the planner. Instead of shooing him away, Rachel felt something click. “Do you want to sell my rocks?” the man asked.

Without hesitation, they said yes. “It was just a very strong, overwhelming feeling,” Rachel remembers. “I still have it. It has never gone away. It was written in the stars.”

They are still friends today, and he even scored an invite to the wedding.

By 2003, Forte Stone was official in Santa Barbara. They started small, with just six stone colors. Today, their yard holds nearly 200 varieties, mostly from Brazil but also from Italy, Peru, Turkey, Israel, and India. Clients come from all over—Los Angeles, Hawaii, Arizona—even from the other side of the world.

“I sold a slab to someone in New Zealand,” Rachel says, laughing. “That’s how far people will go for the right piece.”

A true mom-and-pop shop competing with LA giants, Forte Stone has always been about quality. No cheap commercial slabs. Rachel grew up in Vitória, one of the stone capitals of the world, so she knows her stones. She still visits quarries to ensure water is recycled and workers are treated fairly. Stones, she says, are not just product. They are billions of years old, treasures pulled from the earth, and she treats them with reverence.

The company also has deep ties to its community. After the 2018 fires and mudslides, Forte Stone offered steep discounts to homeowners rebuilding. “That’s just what you do,” Rachel explains.

When I asked her about her favorite stone, she laughed. “Impossible. It changes weekly.” Quartzite ranks high for its durability and wild colors, but ultimately it is about the feeling: the calming hush of pale marble in a bathroom, the gut-punch of bold blue in a shower wall, or the quiet pride when it clicks for a client and they say, this is it.

www.fortestone.com

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