Being a designer is a bit like being a conductor of an orchestra there's
kind of finding that rhythm and finding the right voices to be heard at the right time.
My name is Anna Carin,
I'm the principal of Anna Carin Design Studio and this is my home, Solid Air.
So Solid Air is located in Elizabeth Bay, Gurrajin, it's a highly densely built suburb in
the East of Sydney and consists of predominantly apartment buildings, 98 percent of the built
environment is apartment blocks, there's only about 12 single residences in the whole suburb.
It was pretty clear when I first arrived here, I hadn't seen that many apartments but when
I walked into this room where I'm sitting now and I saw the arched window, the high ceilings,
the little window seat, I was sold immediately, I didn't need to see much more. My job was really
just to remove all the the walls that were in the wrong place and reveal its kind of true nature.
So as you enter the apartment, you come through the hallway and into this dark
narrow space and on the left there are two main rooms which is the study and the bedroom,
on the right you have a sort of guest toilet and the main toilet and then you walk in to
the main room which consists of the kitchen and the sitting room. So working for myself,
I mean the process is very similar whether it's me or with a client, ultimately it's
about trying to identify and draw out the unique aesthetic of a client, even though I'm aware of
my own aesthetics, I still had to go through kind of the same process as I do with a client
and I kind of had to do much of the same thinking for myself, how do I want to be feeling in this
space and how do we want to live here and what are the emotions that this place should evoke.
So every project, we start with the same process and that is to find three emotive words that will
express the space and in this case the words that I pulled out of myself and my partner was serene,
evocative and cosmopolitan and every project we do also have a theme song and it's Solid
Air by John Martin which is one of the first songs that my partner Lars sent to me when we first met
and I love the idea of solid air as well because there is a solidity and a grounding in
it but it also has a lightness so it's like it's connecting to both Heaven and Earth, Solid Air.
I think the mood is kind of monochromatic, everything is the same colour, colour that I've
designed for this apartment and it's loosely based on the tapware which is Vola grey and there's
something about this grey that is predominant in all the materials and in all the joinery in this
colour which is basically that it changes colour, sometimes it's blue, sometimes it's a bit green,
sometimes it becomes a bit yellow and the limestone in the bathroom is in the same colour,
the quartzite in the kitchen, the only sort of space or the only area that's not in that colour
is in the kitchen bench and I really hate when there's a black cooktop sitting in a light bench
so that's why the back bench is black, purely that reason, and that's a black quartzite and then
there's the kitchen island, I'm not a big fan of kitchen islands generally but I wanted the island
to sort of, almost disappear or float. So the majority of the pieces in this apartment actually
came with me from Sweden when I moved here almost 30 years ago and then I like to find things and
repurpose them and reuse it, so I wanted a round table in the kitchen and I found this
one on Facebook Marketplace and we stripped it back and sealed it with a beeswax finish from
Tasmania. The dining chairs are J39's Mogensen, we bought them from a vintage store here in
Sydney and restored them, the cowhide casino chairs was also found in an antique store
and there's also the coffee table which we had some leftover slab after the kitchen bench was
made and it's actually a prototype for a table collection that we're working on.
So my favourite spot in this apartment is, sitting by that big window looking
out over the trees and the buildings and then turning around and looking towards the kitchen
and the living room and just being in awe of the creation outside and my creation inside.