About DVHdesigns

I’m David V. Horste — a lapidary artist based in Portland, Oregon — and I have been working with stone for over five decades.

I began making jewelry at eight years old. By ten, I was cutting and polishing stones. At twelve, I was learning basic silversmithing. What began as childhood fascination became a lifelong practice. I have worked full time as a lapidary artist since 1992.

Stone has always felt like both material and teacher to me. Over time this relationship has evolved into what I call Spiritual Geology — the understanding that stone records pressure, time, heat, fracture, and transformation in ways that inform human experience and our relationship with the natural world.  Spiritual Geology for me is also a kind of personal Protestant Reformation of the Crystal Healing movement. 

My work lives at the intersection of material craft and symbolic meaning. I am especially drawn to unusual rough, historic materials, and found objects with story embedded in them. Over the years I have become known for crafting one-of-a-kind focal beads, cabochons, specimens, and wearable pieces that honor the inherent character of the material.

A Lifetime in Stone

My work spans natural stone, fossil, jet, coal, fluorescent minerals, and rare materials gathered over decades. I maintain a substantial personal inventory of rough acquired through rock clubs, estate collections, long-standing dealer relationships, and years of hands-on exploration.

But one material in particular has become a defining thread in my practice:

Fordite — Genuine Automotive Overspray

My journey with Fordite began in the 1970s through my Michigan rock club. In those early days, auto industry rockhounds salvaged hardened layers of baked paint from factory spray booths — a practice dating back to the late 1960s. Known variously as Fordite, Chryslerite, Buickite, or Detroit Agate, it is layered automotive overspray repeatedly baked in curing ovens, forming a remarkably stable and colorful material.

Over the past four decades, I have cut and polished genuine Fordite using traditional lapidary techniques. I work only with material from trusted and reputable sources, and I stand firmly behind the authenticity of every piece I create. In a marketplace increasingly flooded with resin simulations and layered composites, authenticity and provenance matter.

Fordite represents transformation — industrial byproduct becoming art. It carries history, heat, movement, and color in every layer.  My current genuine Fordite work — beads, pendants, cabochons, earrings, and polished face specimens — can be found in the Fordite collection.

Selling Online Since 2000

I began selling my work online in 2000 and have served thousands of collectors and designers worldwide. After many years working through major online marketplaces, I am especially pleased to offer my full inventory here at DVHdesigns.com — directly from my studio to you.

The “Us” in DVHdesigns

DVHdesigns is more than one name.

It is David — the lifelong stonecutter.

It is also Leo S. Sunshine — my Radical Faerie and Queer Magic ministerial self — who believes creativity, ritual, beauty, exercises in community building, and resilience are inseparable. I contain multitudes.

It includes my office assistant and collaborator Jonath, who supports me in my office one day a week and helps keep the administrative world running so I can stay focused on the stone.

And it includes my beloved partner and fiancé, Peter — known in community as Bio Whimsy of the House of Fae Haven — who supports listings, logistics, and the deeper architecture of my life and work in countless ways.

This studio is a small ecosystem sustained by craft, partnership, and community.

An Ongoing Practice

Certain forms return again and again in my work. Hearts, in particular, have become a recurring meditation — not sentimental, but geological, spiritual, and sociological. Cut from stone, fossil, or industrial material, they speak to fracture, resilience, grief, and warmth over time. There is a deeper story behind these pieces that I share in my Studio Journal for those who wish to explore it further.

I continue to cut and polish each piece by hand using traditional lapidary equipment. The work you see here is one-of-a-kind. When a piece sells, it is gone — though new work is always emerging.

If you are looking for something specific and do not see it listed, feel free to reach out. With decades of rough in inventory, there is often more in the studio than what appears online.

Thank you for your interest in and support of my work. It is an honor to continue shaping stone — and history — one piece at a time.  More will be revealed.

— David V. Horste
DVHdesigns.com