Sometimes the feel and a story about a space is something that sort of
evolves and it's as part of a narrative that we come up with with the client.
When we meet with clients and present design ideas to them, we're essentially getting them, and
through our conversations with them, to imagine how their life would play out in the design. In
that sense, we think of the design discussions with the client as telling stories of how they
might be living in the house. So Bri and Cam, they were going through the story of thinking about
selling, moving on and investigating the ideas of renovation and Paul and I have been friends
for a while now, so it's kind of like this great opportunity to link Bri and Cam with someone's
work that I think is really relevant. I think the match worked really well. So originally the house
was a three bedroom family home and during the design process, it became very apparent that the
main living spaces of the house were detached from the site. As a result of that the backyard didn't
get used. Now the primary thing that's occurred is that the living spaces have been reprogrammed,
whereby the main cooking and eating and living spaces are on the ground in the backyard.
Bri and Cam basically came to us and when they opened up the conversation,
"can you help us specify the furniture" then experimenting with this idea of the tan leather
armchair would tie in with pink rug and terracotta so far. That idea of trying to link the colours,
knowing their personalities, knowing that they weren't afraid to try something different and
then running the idea of a circular rug as well, which sort of stems from the circular
table. I've been trying to get to design a round island bench table in projects for a while and
Cam and Bri were the first clients brave enough to do it. I've really wanted to try it out as a way
of designing a kitchen that was a proper working kitchen but also a social one. We really love
Paul's paired back architectural sense of design, like there's some beautiful details throughout
this house that just worked so simply and this is a really good example of how that works. Try
to find kitchen products that are well detailed in a way that they contribute to the design and
they're not opposing or recalibrating the design and it's actually the case that in
all projects our default product to specify is Fisher and Paykel, for that exact reason.
Our designers worked tirelessly on this to fit within the kitchen space. They like when
they are hidden, when they are integrated, they do tuck away and they just do blend
in with the kitchen but when they are on show they really do look the part.
Cam and Bri the clients were not just trusting but enthusiastic and excited about ideas that
we would come up with so the design part of the process was easy and was in fact fun and
exciting. People lament over small junctions and surfaces for hours and days on end,
where it sort of then becomes like this sort of a lost sort of detail that people use day to day
and didn't really give it any more thought but coming up with that, someone spent time
and effort and only wanted the best our of that detail, which would then better someone's life
and it was lovely to see and be able to witness both, before and after and then
witnessed the happiness that comes out of of a space that is designed so well.