The home of our dear friend Kate Dinon was recently featured by The Design Files.

A few years ago we worked with Kate on the refurbishment of her beautiful terrace. However, the recent arrival of Kate and Alex’s beautiful daughter Marlowe called for a refresh to the home. The interior update reflects the couple’s ever expanding art collection and all those final layering elements that are naturally collected over time.

Credits
Published originally by The Design Files 28/10/2015
Story & production: Lucy Feagins
Photography: Annette O’Brien

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Vogue Living
Nov/Dec 2015
‘Mercury Rising‘ pages 39, 41, 44

House & Garden
October 2015
‘Funny Side Up‘ pages 26, 27

Belle
October 2015
‘Full tweed Ahead’ page 43

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WHO DO YOU CALL?

When you make the decision to renovate, the first question you usually ask is, who do I need? An architect, designer or decorator? The common misconception around who to employ for you project is why we wrote The Facts on our website. We could see similarities in the kinds of questions clients asked time and time again. So lets try and clear that up.

You will need an architect for adding an extension or another floor, or for a tear down and re-build. Makes sense right? On the flip-side, if you’re only looking to repaint, change out the furniture or add some accents and throw pillows, a decorator, who’s most at home with soft furnishings and minor cosmetic work will do just fine. This is also where a good interior designer comes in. Any studio worth it’s salt will have the technical chops and visual artistry to completely redo an existing house or apartment. And we often do.

There’s one further question as to when you can use a draftsman. The truth is, we work with both depending on what the project calls for. When we work with a draftsman, we normally drive the design. When we work with an architect, they do.

BRING YOURSELF TO THE TABLE

Gather an image file together either on Pinterest or an old school manilla folder full of magazine tear sheets of ideas and things you love. Use this as your testing ground to help you eliminate concepts or finishes you liked early on but grow tired of as you train you eye.

Designers appreciate a thoughtfully involved client. So that means doing some homework before you embark on the project. What are the things you love that you have always dreamed about having? Don’t worry about ‘how’ it might come to life. It may not actually be possible, but just the idea alone can give a designer a spark to another great idea. Or at least provide some insight into your personality. We love being able to colour outside the lines.

Occasionally we have clients who barely have any possessions that describe how they want to live as they have been gifted with hand me downs or bought ‘it’ll do’ pieces until they do the big number. Without a vision of what the future might be, we are left to glean a narrative from our conversations and interpretation of your life and new roots.

CHOOSE YOUR TEAM WISELY…AND EARLY!

Once you’ve worked out what design styles you keep coming back to, use that to assist choosing your design team. Whose work and values align closely with your vision? Designers and architects aren’t as interested in clients who just want someone to help them with the project. We prefer it if there’s a synergy between what we do and what you are looking for. A kind of simpatico makes for a more successful project on every level.

Once you’ve selected your people, get prepared to pay good money for them. Experience at this level doesn’t come cheap. Consider the impact on your prosperity of not choosing well or cutting corners on your designer or architect when you are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s an investment you will make once, twice, three times if you are lucky in your life. It’s a long relationship (often 1-2yrs) and one that you will want to enjoy. So choose wisely. Don’t haggle on fees; focus on retracting the scope instead.

An interested designer should be asking you how you want to live? How do you cook or entertain? What do you do on Sunday mornings? Do you have a big family? Or plan on having any more kids? All of these kinds of questions help frame not only what you will need from your future house, but also how you want to feel in it. This is key. And if you aren’t being asked these questions, ask why not? How is my designer gauging the information they need to give me a truly fabulous design response to my brief? Be conscious.

The second part of this point is to choose your team early. Often an interior designer can be brought in at the masterplan stage before all the room planning is signed off. Admittedly this is when we get called the most; when there are a few areas that haven’t quite fallen into place. We find having another set of eyes that come from an interior perspective to be the secret sauce to unlocking the plan. It will also mean that furniture arrangement will mostly likely be considered for the first time. Sounds crazy? Happens all the time. So call early. Don’t wait to think about your interior until after you’ve broken ground.

THINK BIG TO THINK SMALL

Be prepared to have your ideas challenged and to be pushed. Giving your designers some leeway on ideas will bring in the big guns and what I call the ‘push’ ideas early on in the piece. Getting clear on a concept from the start will make all the other millions of decisions much easier to make, as they will all reference back to the original idea.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Now its time to talk about contracts and money.
A few tips….
Number one, take your budget then double it. Sneeze and you’ve spent a hundred grand. Just doing a new kitchen will mean remedial works to adjacent areas, so painting, fixing the floors, new lighting and new joinery will all add to your budget. In our work, we can’t really look at anything under $150K and know that it’s going to be worthwhile for the client having a designer involved. Always come to the costing conversation with full disclosure. It makes no sense to play your cards close to your chest as that will help us advocate or advise in your best interests. We’re not here to spend all your money, we’re here to help you lift to that next level the best way you can!

Ballparking the job. There are two ways to do this. Either working with a trusted builder to provide an estimate of the project will normally happen after the concept or master plan phase. This is not a tender process; there is no sense in asking multiple builders for their estimates of the project. The purpose of the exercise is essentially feasibility, to establish a ballpark costing for the project, are we going ahead? You also must understand, there are many variables that have not yet been determined that will still impact the price. The other way is to engage a quantity surveyor who will need a lot of information to determine an estimate of the project’s cost. They will need to know things like, what finishes are required on all the joinery, whether tiling is full height, extent of new electrical etc. You might appreciate then that a good deal of design work has to be done in order for the QS price to be accurate. Sometime this can defeat the purpose. For us, it’s a case-by-case scenario and we normally work with out trusted builders who know our work and know the outcome our clients and ourselves are looking for.

Then it comes to tendering. In theory you receive three prices, but generally one price is too low, a median price, and one that’s far too high or they don’t want the job (could be both). In that case, it’s a good idea to have a fourth builder on hand. Alternatively, for smaller projects, we will negotiate a contract price with a nominated builder where it makes no sense to tender. Fixed price contracts are advised with critical information like a completion date, penalties for going over and a clear indication of variation cost percentages are all needed for smooth running of a building project. A final option of cost-plus is also an option if your builder is open to it. This essentially means it’s the cost of works plus the builder’s margin in an open-ended arrangement, the pitfalls of which are if it takes longer, it costs more. For any option it’s a good idea to have your designer project manage it, fielding the many questions that come from site. Normally, if it’s a large job requiring an architect, they will naturally include administration of the contract as part of their full service.

So there you have it, common pitfalls and insights from the front line.

All in all, consider your designer and architect as your partner or advocate.
The more you can trust and build that relationship with full disclosure, trust and belief, the better for all.

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The best results are achieved when colour choices are brave and deliberate!

This week I thought I’d have a conversation with myself about colour!
We’re always workshopping colour, texture and pattern in the studio, so here are some thoughts and musings from behind the sheer curtain as it were.

Why use colour?
Colour is the ultimate mood maker.

Do you have a favourite colour? 
I love all colours but I didn’t realise until we set up fabric drawers in the studio to sort all our samples by colour that there were certain drawers that were bursting with samples, and others that were not. I naturally gravitate towards denim or navy blues, peachy pinks, celadon greens and rusty terracottas, tobacco leathers, metallic golds and strong multicolours that combine all my favourites. Also black and white when combined with texture help lift these colours into amazing territory.

How does colour influence a mood?
Colour is a mood shifter and can do more for a space than only one single thing on its own in an interior. Whether we realise it or not, we all respond emotionally to colour. A particular hue might remind us of the school jumper we wore to boarding school (not ideal if they weren’t happy days) or the colour of our favourite flower. Our perspective on colour is influenced by our visual memory, what we’ve connected to in the past. That may also explain why people are naturally shy when it comes to experimenting with colour. It can be very unfamiliar territory.

How do you work with colour?
How colours are combined in a room is key. There should be a lead colour that anchors the space that is the predominant colour. To stop the room from feeling too one dimensional, there needs to be additional accent colours that sit in proportion to the main colour. These are often complimentary colours or colours that ‘riff’ off the main one without competing for attention. This is key, you can either inject a colour accent by dropping a chair in an unexpected hue or selecting an artwork with major colour saturation to give the lift you are after. I know many people suggest doing colour accents in throw pillows or art but often I don’t find this goes far enough. The room should have the beginnings of personality before these things are added as the finishing touches.

What is the toughest challenge when it comes to using colour?
It takes time to build up a palette with the right combination of colours. Often we find we might build a scheme around a few key colours and a client will say, I’m not a fan of ‘blue’ or that colour is ‘too strong’. Often what they’re saying is, I didn’t imagine having a green sofa or dark blue ceiling, that’s too unfamiliar. Once you take those things out, you lose the magic. So, having the guts to try something new is the biggest obstacle. What I’ve learned over the years in experimenting over and over with colour is it needs to be stronger than you think for it to really feel like ‘colour’. If you dilute it to the safe zone, it just washes out.

How do you begin your creative process?
If its a furnishing project, more often than not we start with the rug first. This is a key element in the space, and the colour mix is really important. Often we’re sourcing rugs that already exist and we may start with one direction but go completely in another once we find the perfect rug. We then build up all the other elements around the colours in the rug. If we are customising a rug where we hand select the tufts, we do everything in reverse and the rug comes last.

Coming earlier to a project where we are renovating or painting, the concept direction comes first. Is it relaxed boho, modern farmhouse, or avant-garde New York pad. We establish the mood with a colour direction, use that to set the joinery finishes on the right path then come back and finalise the wall colours. So we come at it from all angles during the creative process.

I love the concept phase as that’s the juiciest part of thinking freely. We invariably go through a wobbly middle period where the client considers how challenging our ideas are. If we’re ultimately in sync, we arrive at our destination, colour and ideas intact and ready for action.

What about using colour in large or small spaces? 
The common catch cry is “my space is small, won’t painting it dark make it feel smaller?” or “this room is dark already, won’t painting it dark make it even darker?” Absolutely not is our answer. Going with a design constraint to create an opportunity is the best approach. Small spaces lend themselves to an explosion of colour, pea green powder room anyone? with copper basins? We’ve done it. Its a small controlled space to have a lot of fun. And wrap the colour onto the ceiling too, this prevents the stop/start look. Painting out small spaces gives them personality which helps it punch much higher above its weight and distracts you from realising the space is small. This also goes for dark spaces. Without moving the sun, if the space is already dark, its not going to get any lighter by painting it in a lighter hue. Embracing this ‘limitation’ and creating personality by going dark is the best medicine. If using a strong colour rather than ‘going dark’, you need to bear in mind some colours work better in light or dark conditions.

Can bold colour choices be used in all interior styles?
Not always, selecting colour is about context as much as it is about mood. For instance, strong colours in a beachy location may not feel as appropriate or relaxing when surrounded by ocean colours and muted sandy tones and wispy tea trees. We start with what we’re starting with – the architecture, the history, the context. And we take it from there. If colour can’t be used as strongly, then adding texture is the answer. This lifts colours out of their one dimensional context if you are layering tones.

How do you experiment with colour?
By playing with it and building confidence. It should ultimately be fun.

A graphic black & white dining room by Alberto Pinto.

These tall ceilings are celebrated with this powdery blue. Source unknown

A flat in Paris decorated by Britt Moran & Emiliano Salci of Dimore

A dark ceiling packs a punch in this otherwise neutral room by Tobi Fairley.

Colour doesn’t need to be reserved for paint. Introduce colour through your joinery to give life to a space. Source unknown

Jeff And Lara Sanderson’s Mercer Island home featured in Elle Decor.

A great example of a tonal colour palette. Source unknown

Warm neutrals are offset with a deep jewel tone in the Pierre Yovanovitch designed, Quai Anatole Apartment.

Dirty pastels are used in this space to create a perfect example of colour zoning space. Source unknown

This Kelly Wearstler space introduces colour through pattern and texture.

A strong colour creates the perfect amount of interest in this Kelly Wearstler designed space.

India Mahdavi uses an eclectic mix of furniture is the way this space introduces a colour personality.

A warm grey contrasts the sunflower yellow of this kitchen cabinetry. Source unknown

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Ilse Crawford with the Alvar Aalto 400 armchair she designed for the 75th anniversary celebrations.

Last summer I read Ilse Crawford’s book ‘A Frame For Life’ cover to cover. In those pages I found a design philosophy that resonates so closely with my own approach that it has become the most post-it marked, notes in the margin book on my shelves of late. Ilse is somewhat obsessed with creating spaces that make us feel at home. And from this vantage point, she creates interiors full of familiarity; with soulful materials you understand and furniture you want to plop down in, not just look at. Her own apartment near the Tate Modern, she designed with another of my architectural heart throbs; Vincent Van Duysen, is a long train carriage of a space without walls or doors, divided by a spine of book shelves down one length, a series of doors concealing storage on the other. Between the two, is strung a hammock in the living room. And there it is, the answer to a question of ‘how do we want to live?’
She had me at the hammock.

“Home is a practical way to weave our many emotional needs into daily life.”

Before the work of her design practice Studioilse began to win hearts, Ilse was best known as the launch editor of Elle Decoration in 1989. Back then I remember it was the only international design magazine worth reading. The interiors in those pages felt exciting but relatable, with glossy images full of the clutter of life which she fought for against the immaculate compositions photographers favoured at the time. For this, she is widely credited for teaching the British to love modern. After a decade at the helm of the influential magazine, she left to head up Donna Karan Home in New York. Not surprisingly, she decided she didn’t wan’t to be a ‘corporate creature’ returning back to her design roots at Eindhoven Design Academy in Holland, becoming head of a department grandly titled ‘Man and Well-Being.’ Some time later she set up her own design consultancy Studioilse.

Crawford was born in London in 1962. She has four siblings, a younger brother followed by triplet sisters who were born when she was seven. The family lived in London’s Shepherd’s Bush before moving to Kent, where they colonised a ramshackle house that never seemed warm enough, she recalls, but nonetheless became a social hub of the neighbourhood. ‘I remember when there were loads of us all squished into the same bed, or when friends came round because they didn’t like staying in their own houses because they liked ours better.’ Her father, Malcolm Crawford, was an economist and an editor at the Sunday Times; her Danish mother, Jill Rendall, was an artist and pianist who sometimes took her out on nighttime expeditions to chisel 19th-century tiles off the walls of terrace houses marked for demolition. At university, Crawford studied the history of architecture. The empirical outlook her father had instilled in her began to find expression in her thinking about the built world. “His big thing was, interrogate everything,” she says, “do not ever be complacent.” She developed a working style that was both forensic and collaborative, which has since become the foundation of her practice.

Back to her book, when describing this foundational approach, she asks, “How do you measure well-being, happiness, tactility, trust, freedom, beauty, love, memory and so on?” Coming back to those questions as the starting point for any design is how she imbues such nostalgia in her interiors. Nostalgia for the things that are so often lost in our buildings and spaces by giving meaning and value to the small rituals. So we feel like home, at home.

“The design of the spaces we love allows us to add a bit of ourselves, to adapt and customise over time. There is always a tension between the design and the way we inhabit it, but truly inhabitable space is open to accidents, is a background to life. It makes people feel good and grounded and free without knowing why. It makes the normal special rather than creating the spectacular.”

Ilse is a designer whose work fights to preserve our unmeasurable human values from the outset. It is certainly not, she says, about arriving with a load of cool furniture at the end. A reminder then, that not everything that counts, can be counted.

Ett Hem guesthouse – Stockholm (2012)

The Madison Ave Anya Hindmarsh store – New York (2013)

The Ilse Crawford-designed brass cabinet by Jack Trench (2014)

Duddell’s – Hong Kong (2013)

Inside the StudioIlse offices

The Olde Bell inn – Berkshire (2007)

Matsalen restaurant, Grand Hotel Stockholm – Sotckholm (2007)

Ett Hem guesthouse – Stockholm (2012)

Great Guillford St, the home of Ilse Crawford – London (2003)

Sinnerlig collection for IKEA (2015)

Matbaren restaurant, Grand Hotel Stockholm – Stockholm (2007)

Mount St Aesop store – London (2008)

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Source: In Residence series, Nowness

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Real Living, March 2015 issue. Full length feature on pages 117-125

Our StillLife collection has just landed at Potts Point retailer Becker Minty, so we thought it a great opportunity to revisit ‘Kick-Ass Interiors‘, an editorial feature in the March issue of Real Living magazine. The pieces were featured across the spread, including a spot on the cover! The graphic silhouette’s of our ceramics perfectly complimented the punchy personality of this inspirational feature.

We are so please to be housed in such a beautiful store and with the great support of the Becker Minty team. Head over their online store to shop the collection and read their great blog on the collection.

(VIC stockist to be announced shortly!)

Styling: Sarah Ellison
Photography: Nick Scott

Dipped Tall Vase and Dipped Bell Vase

Painted Tall Vase and Large Gold Spotlight

Dipped Tall Vase and Painted Bell Vase

Painted Tall Vase and Large Gold Spotlight

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Ettore Sottsass

Architect, industrial designer, philosopher and provocateur; Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) led a revolution in the aesthetics and technology of modern design in the late 20th Century. Born in the Dolomites to Italian-Austrian parentage, the past to him was the rationalist Bauhaus doctrine of his father, Ettore Sottsass Sr., a prominent Italian architect. “When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism,” he once said. “It’s not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting.”

Sottsass was best known as the godfather of the Memphis Group — a design collective, formed in Milan in 1980 that attracted enormous attention around the world for its shock value. Most famous for it’s irreverent, spirited members who were determined to reshape the design world and had grown disillusioned by the black and brown modernism that had become endemic in the 1970s. Memphis embodied the themes with which Sottsass had been experimenting since his mid-1960s ‘superboxes’ developed for Polotronova: bright colours, kitsch suburban motifs and furniture built with cheap materials like plastic laminates. Sottsass’ most recognised designs appeared in the first Memphis collection issued in 1981— notably the multihued, angular “Carlton” room divider and “Casablanca” bookcase.

He designed with the idea that the object created should serve as an instrument of life. He was opposed to standardisation and interested in uncertainty, inconclusiveness, sensuality, melancholy and pleasure. “Everything must remain possible” he said, and “It must be possible to design instability.” He liked “bastard situations”, where many jarring factors combined. He saw design not only as the fulfilling of a function, but of proposing ways of doing so. A chair could suggest “a new way to sit”, and with it a fragment of a new world.

“I began to think that if there was a reason for designing objects, it was in one way or another, to help people live…to achieve a sort of therapeutic action, to make objects that stimulate the perceptions that each of us has or can have from our own experiences.”

In the 1960s he had a fruitful collaboration with Olivetti, in which he created the groundbreaking typewriters encased in bright red bodies, and elegant computers that filled a room. His primary concern when designing was not the technology of the machinery inside it, but the physiology and feelings of the person who would use it. When he designed furniture, he was thinking less of the perfection of the object than of the room in which it might sit and of the life that might be going on in that room. “To be an architect,” he said, “you have to become very gentle, very calm and extremely sensitive about life.”

Sottsass based his life’s work on the theme of experimentation. It was as an artist that he was most celebrated in his life. In his formative years he would design and make his own posters to promote his painting exhibitions. His foray into sculpture and ceramics was largely untrained and experimental, his pieces resembling totemic “little architectures”, reflecting the influences from his training. He wrote theoretical papers on painting and design. He self-published a magazine documenting his reflections on American life whilst in hospital recovering from a grave illness contracted in India. He was a renegade, a free thinker, a renaissance man who hung out with all the great artists and thinkers of his day.

“I don’t believe in categories, whether of the mind or professional disciplines. So far, history shows, that the best designers started as painters, that the best painters started as lawyers, the best archaeologists started as bankers, the best writers started as sailors and so forth. The disciplines are always defined when all is done, and when all is done, there is nothing else to keep me interested.”

In 2006, close to the end of his life, whilst exhibiting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art a year later, Sottsass’s work continued to prompt critical debate. And for a man whose greatest pleasure was in astonishing, delighting and ruffling feathers, perhaps there was no greater accolade. That the work remains so revolutionary and bold — that it breaks with convention so sharply it will never be considered mainstream — is a testament to his genius.

Thome Phillipe & Picchi Francesca (2014). Ettore Sottsass. Australia: Phaidon.

Thome Phillipe & Picchi Francesca (2014). Ettore Sottsass. Australia: Phaidon.

Thome Phillipe & Picchi Francesca (2014). Ettore Sottsass. Australia: Phaidon.

“Casablanca” Bookcase (1981), Ettore Sottsass

Sculpture (1985), Ettore Sottsass

Seating near Enigma (1987), Ettore Sottsass

Glazed Ceramic Vase and Bowl (1980s), Ettore Sottsass for Bitossi

“Carlton” Room Divider (1981), Ettore Sottsass

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‘Energy for Creativity’ by Interni magazine.  Installation: Punti di Vista by Piuarch produced by Marazzi.

Architect and designer Gaetano Pesce photographed by Max&Douglas for VanityFair Italy.

BDDW ANNEC objects and lighting collection by Apparatus Studio.

Apparatus Studio at Salone del Mobile 2015.

Nilufar Depot by Nina Yashar at Salone del Mobile 2015.

‘LIVING IN A CHAIR” by Federico Peri.

 

Gaetano Pesce pictured in the 357 Feltri Chair he designed for Cassina

Mobile Frontale sculpture-cabinet by Pietro Consagra. 1956 / 2015

Gebruder Thonet Post Mundus by Martino Gamper shown at Salone del Mobile 2015.

Gam Fratesi desk for Gebruder Thonet ALLEGORY

Cassina Rio table designed by Charlotte Perriand

Paume Chair by David/Nicolas for Nilufar gallery.

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