There is a particular madness to a city in a heatwave, and this summer London discovered its own. The parks filled by ten in the morning. Rosé appeared at lunch as though by civic decree. Everyone became, briefly, an expert on cross-ventilation and the precise hour to open the windows. We watched the whole performance from the studio, charmed and a little uneasy, because underneath the novelty was something we recognised: a city improvising comfort it used to be given for free.

Heat does this. It strips a place back to how it really works. You learn very quickly which rooms are kind and which are not, which café keeps its shade, which friend has the flat you actually want to be in by four o’clock. A hot week turns all of us into connoisseurs of cool, and almost none of us, we noticed, looked to the building itself for the answer. We looked to the machine.

We kept thinking, through it all, of a house in the hills above the Atlas Mountains. You know the kind, even if you have never been: low and white, windows like deep-set eyes, a courtyard at its heart with water moving somewhere out of sight. People have been photographing these houses for a century and calling them romantic. They are not romantic. They are devastatingly practical, disguised as romance. Step inside at the cruellest hour of the afternoon and the air turns to early evening. You feel your whole body recalibrate. It is the most luxurious thing in the world, and it costs nothing, and it runs on nothing, and we have somehow decided it belongs to the past.

It did not separate comfort from beauty. The cool room and the lovely room were the same room.

This is the quiet comedy of how we live now. We will pay a great deal for the idea of these places, a holiday in a riad, a long table under a fig tree, the linen, the lime wash, the whole sun-warmed fantasy, and then come home and build the opposite. Thin walls. Vast glass. A view we cool at enormous expense and call, without irony, a luxury.

We bought the postcard and threw away the instructions printed on the back.

Because there were instructions. Mass, so the wall drinks the cool of the night and returns it slowly through the day. Shade, because nothing flatters a room, or a face, like being kept out of direct sun. Water, for the air and for the nerves both. The riad knew this. So did the patio, the cortijo, the hammam, every culture that ever had to be elegant in the heat rather than merely survive it. They did not separate comfort from beauty. The cool room and the lovely room were the same room. That was the whole art of it.

Somewhere we let those two things drift apart, and decided that beauty was the look of a place and comfort was the thing we’d add later, with a remote control. The houses we keep returning to, in a hundred villages no magazine has bothered with, never made that mistake. They are still standing. They are still cool. They are, if you go quiet enough inside one, still teaching.

We are not nostalgists, and we are not against the machine. We are simply struck, every summer a little more, by how much pleasure we have engineered out of the way we live, and how recoverable it is. When people ask why we build the way we do, this is the closest we come to an answer: we are trying to make rooms that know how to hold you, in the heat and out of it, without being asked. Most people can still remember a room like that. The strange luxury of our moment is that we get to build them on purpose.

For most of the last decade, design was a brand exercise. The studio became a logo. The product became content. The work, somewhere along the way, became a campaign.

Something is changing now.

The biggest names in design have stopped designing. They have started commissioning. They are turning to small workshops, named makers, single-discipline studios, and asking them to do what they have always done: make the work, slowly, at the scale they were built for. The brand provides the platform. The workshop provides the hand. The object that results is something neither could have made alone.

We’ve been watching this shift for a while now. We think it is the most consequential thing happening in our industry, and no one has named it yet.

It is the return of the patron.

HOW WE GOT HERE

It is worth asking how we arrived. None of this is accidental.

Let’s get into it.

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In 1917, Erik Satie coined a phrase for music that was not meant to be listened to. He called it musique d'ameublement. Furniture music. Sound designed not to be listened to, but to exist in a space the way a chair or a wall does. To furnish.

Sixty years later, Brian Eno softened the idea naming it ambient. Music as ignorable as it was interesting. In 1980s Japan, a generation of composers took it further still. Kankyo Ongaku, environmental music became an ethos. Hiroshi Yoshimura wrote albums commissioned for museums, lifestyle stores, prefabricated homes. The sound was not played in the building. It was part of its specification.

Then this line of thought went quiet. Music in public space became an afterthought, looped from a phone, chosen by whoever.

We are watching it return. The slow renaissance of high-fidelity rooms, the audiophile cafes in Tokyo, Paris and London where the speakers are the architecture. The aesthetics are familiar. But the substance is something newer.

These rooms are not nostalgic. They are refusal. A push back against constant noise and frictional consumption, in favour of presence, attention, and the older idea that a space can be designed around what is heard inside it.

We move through these rooms ourselves.

When we run out of vocabulary for what a space is doing, we reach for music.

We talk about rhythm in a façade. Tempo in a sequence of rooms. Composition. Harmony. Register. Key. The spatial language is thinner than the musical one, and we have learned to fill the gap by borrowing.

A good listening room is not loud. It is composed. The plaster catches a high frequency, the timber softens a low one, the curtain breathes between them. The room produces its own weather, and the weather is part of why you stayed.

There are three quiet decisions a room is making whether you have made them or not. Hard surfaces chooses its pitch. Soft materials chooses its breath. Proportion chooses its key.

The rooms that sound right are the rooms where all three were composed together, from the first sketch. The object can come later. The room is already the instrument.

See you next week,

The modular sofa market is worth five billion dollars and growing. Somewhere in that number is a cultural diagnosis.

We’ve been watching the conversation — online, in briefs, in showrooms — and what strikes us isn’t the furniture. It’s the need it’s answering. People aren’t buying modular pieces because they love systems. They’re buying them because flexibility became the most rational response to modern life. The apartment changes. The circumstances change. Why shouldn’t the sofa?

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OBJECTS WITH OPINIONS

This is worth taking seriously as a cultural moment, not just a market trend. The greatest pieces of furniture ever made don’t reconfigure. The Eames lounge chair doesn’t extend. The Sori Yanagi butterfly stool doesn’t stack into a larger butterfly stool. The Barcelona chair exists in one form, makes one argument, and has been making it since 1929. These objects have outlasted every apartment they’ve ever sat in — not despite their fixedness, but because of it.

A thing that knows what it is holds its ground across decades.

What modular furniture offers instead is optionality. Which sounds like freedom but is often just postponed decision-making. The system says: you don’t have to choose yet. The room waits. The object waits. The decision accumulates. And the space never quite becomes a place.

WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING

There is something else happening at the high end, though — and this is where it gets interesting.

The best modular furniture being designed right now isn’t about flexibility at all. It’s about something more rigorous: designing objects that hold their identity regardless of how they’re arranged. The module that stands alone as well as it stands in assembly. The piece that doesn’t defer to its configuration — that makes its argument at every scale, in every combination.

This is a completely different problem from furniture you can move around. It’s closer to designing a typeface — every character has to work alone and as part of a word, a line, a page. The system only works if each unit is already resolved.

When modular furniture achieves this, it stops feeling like a workaround. It starts feeling like a position.

ON OUR OWN TERMS

A room you’ve committed to has a completely different energy from one you’re still deciding on. You feel it the moment you walk in. The furniture landed. The space resolved. Someone made a choice and lived inside it.

That’s what we’re after. Always.

We are also working on something that takes the modular question seriously — on our own terms. Not as a solution to small spaces. As a design problem in its own right. What it means to make a family of objects with shared material logic that moves between configurations without ever losing its character.

The answer looks nothing like what’s currently filling the market.

More soon.

Every April, Milan asks a question. The city doesn’t always know how to answer it. The answer is scattered across a thousand stands, a dozen Fuorisalone districts, three days of jetlag and a lot of very good espresso. But this year, the question itself was sharper than usual.

A Matter of Salone. Matter as origin. Matter as memory. Matter as a possibility not yet activated.

Because what Salone was calling a theme, we recognised as a practice. The conversation Milan was opening in April 2026, we’d been having quietly in the studio for years.

This is our attempt to put it into words.

THE IMAGE PROBLEM

There is a version of design that exists entirely as image. The render, the hero shot, the perfectly lit campaign. It arrives complete, untouchable. You cannot ask where the stone came from, who cut it, how it will age.

For a long time, this was enough. The industry rewarded the image.

What struck us reading this year’s programme — the curation choices, the objects selected for Raritas, the brief given to SaloneSatellite — was a collective refusal of that logic. Quiet, consistent, unannounced. A turn away from the surface and toward the interior of the thing.

Matter that can be touched, read, interpreted. That was how the fair put it. We’d simply call it: material honesty.

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WHAT WE ALREADY KNEW

We didn’t arrive at this position through theory. We arrived through work.

When we brief a craftsman, we don’t begin with the finish. We begin with the behaviour of the material how it carries a joint, how it reads in shadow, how it will move in ten years. The object comes later. The material is always first.

The Kei pendant took its time not because we were slow, but because the material logic took time to resolve. The dining set began with the timber sitting with the grain, the density, the way it would age. The form followed. It always does.

This is not a method we invented. The Moroccan plaster worker building a tadelakt wall understands it. The Andalusian carpenter keying a joint without metal understands it. What was notable about Milan this year was not that the thinking was present as it is always present somewhere. What was notable was that the fair chose to name it.

MATTER AS MEMORY

Materials don’t arrive neutral. Stone carries geology. Timber carries climate. Zellige carries the hand of the master cutter across centuries of craft. Work with them honestly, and that memory stays live in the object.

Formafantasma’s Salone Raritas made this argument spatially. The objects inside weren’t products. They were propositions each one carrying a material history, a tradition it was in dialogue with, something it was quietly resisting. The quality lived not in the forms but in the questions asked before the tool was picked up.

It is the difference between a wall that tells you something and a wall that merely presents itself.

THE STANDARD

The standard of a piece of work cannot be read from the photograph. It lives in the decisions that preceded it. The material selected and the ones refused. The joint re-detailed. The proportion adjusted by hand. The conversation with the maker that ran three hours over a sample no one would ever see.

That is what the client inherits when they choose to work with a studio rather than buy from a catalogue.

Milan Design Week ran this year under Essere Progetto — Be the Project. Design as process, not output. Together with A Matter of Salone, the two framings make an argument we find true.

We are not naive about trade fairs. Themes are also campaigns. The language of materiality can be co-opted as easily as any other language, faster, because it sounds serious.

What matters is whether the work holds. Material first. Craft second. Form third. Image last.

This year, Salone asked the questions we built this practice around. That is not a reason for satisfaction. It is a reason to go further.

Every project eventually comes back to the table. Not because clients prioritise it — most don’t, at least not at the start — but because the table is where the room’s contradictions become visible.

It has to be large enough to seat ten and still feel right for two. It has to feel substantial without making the room feel heavy. It has to hold candles, wine glasses, flowers, and laptops without feeling provisional.

It is, by most measures, an impossible object.

We have been thinking about dining tables more deliberately than usual. Partly because of a modular dining set we have been developing for the past several months — and partly because we keep finding ourselves drawn back to the same question: what makes one table feel inevitable and another merely competent?

The difference is rarely what people assume.

THE TOP

Start with the surface. This is where most people make their first mistake, choosing material before dimension. The two decisions cannot be separated. A 3cm travertine top behaves differently at 90cm wide than at 120cm. Stone at that thickness needs mass beneath it to read correctly — not to support the weight, but because a thick top on a light base looks nervous. The material implies a logic. You have to follow it.

Timber is the opposite problem. A 4cm solid oak top has warmth that can tip into heaviness depending on what the base does. The grain becomes directional — you start feeling the length of the board rather than the breadth of the table. This is not inherently wrong, but it is a decision, and we have seen too many projects where it was not made consciously.

We tend to specify surfaces at the thicker end — 3.5 to 4cm for stone, 4cm for solid timber — not because we favour bulk but because there is an honesty to material at full depth. A veneer knows it is a veneer. There is a reason the edge is usually the first thing a person runs their hand along when they sit down.

THE BASE

The base is doing the most structural work and, if it is doing its job properly, the least visual work. This is a difficult thing to brief. Clients want the base to be interesting. Fabricators want to build something that presents well in the workshop. The room wants something that disappears when the chairs are pushed in and the table is in use.

What we find works: bases that respond to the top rather than compete with it. A trestle in blackened steel under a travertine top reads as two different temperatures — warm stone, cold metal — and the contrast does the work that ornament might otherwise try to do. A turned timber leg under a timber top collapses those temperatures into one material register, which requires the form of the leg to carry the differentiation alone. The tolerances are tighter. There is less room for imprecision.

Bases that try to be sculptural — that introduce a shape intended to be seen from across the room — almost always lose when chairs arrive. The chair is the table’s context. You cannot design the object without designing the relationship.

THE PROPORTION

The question we are asked most is about dimensions. How wide should it be? How high? The standard 75cm table height was set for a body shape and a chair height that no longer dominate contemporary production. We typically specify 73cm, occasionally 72cm, depending on the chair. This sounds minor. It is not minor. At 75cm, most people sit slightly too low relative to the surface. The table looms. At 73cm, the body settles.

Width is where more goes wrong. The received wisdom is 90cm minimum for a formal dining table. We think this is a floor, not a target. At 90cm, two people can sit opposite one another and make conversation without raising their voices, but the objects between them — the plates, the glasses, the flowers — are crowded. At 100cm, there is a middle zone. The table begins to have a centre. That centre becomes somewhere for light to land.

WHAT THE TABLE HOLDS

There is a version of this conversation that stays technical — dimensions, materials, joinery — and there is a version that asks what a dining table is for. We think the latter is more useful.

The dining table used to anchor domestic time. Meals were the structure. The table was where the day cohered. That function has changed and splintered — breakfast at a counter, lunch at a desk, dinner on the sofa. What a formal dining table holds now is not daily life but curated time. The occasions where people decide, in advance, that gathering matters. The table has become an argument for that kind of intentionality.

This is why the object needs to feel serious. Not heavy or formal — serious in the sense of being made with an understanding of what it is being asked to carry. A table that was designed quickly, specified cheaply, or specified before anyone asked what it would need to hold will communicate exactly that. Guests feel it without being able to name it. The room slackens.

The tables we are drawn to have all been made by someone who understood this. Not always expensive, not always by a known maker. But always an object where a decision was made about every dimension, every joint, every edge profile. Nothing arrived by default.

In Mediterranean culture, this was never in question. The table did not need to be justified. It was the room. Everything else arranged itself around it. The kitchen fed it. The light fell on it. The afternoon was measured by how long people stayed after the meal had finished.

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The pasos or the enormous floats that move through Andalusian streets during Semana Santa — are among the most materially dense objects we have encountered.

Not decoratively complex in the way that word is often used to dismiss things. But materially complex: multiple craft disciplines working simultaneously on a single structure, each operating at a standard that would be demanding in isolation, achieving something collectively that no single hand could.

What interests us is how they are built. And specifically, what the conditions of their use demanded of the people who built them — because those conditions are unlike almost anything else in the designed world.

A paso is made to be seen from below, while moving slowly through a narrow street, surrounded by thousands of people holding candles. It is designed for one week a year. The rest of the year it sits in a church in the dark.

That brief produced a material intelligence we haven't stopped thinking about since.

CARVED CEDAR

The figures on the pasos are carved from wood — cedar, pine, cypress — and painted to a resolution that takes time to fully register. The oldest surviving examples date to the sixteenth century. Standing close to one, the technical ambition becomes uncomfortable: the veins on the back of a hand rendered in grain and paint. The compression of skin where a rope binds. The exact musculature of a figure in a specific posture, carved at lifesize or larger, with no degree of approximation acceptable at any point.

That ambition places enormous demands on the craft. The grain of the wood has to be read correctly at every point, worked with or against depending on what the surface needs to become. The paint is layered and glazed to achieve translucency, not flatness. Eyes are often made from glass, because painted eyes at this resolution simply do not convince.

The carver's task is to make something true. Accuracy is the discipline. Every other quality — the weight the object carries when you stand in front of it — arrives as a consequence of getting that accuracy right.

EMBROIDERED VELVET

The great cloaks worn by the Virgin figures — the mantos — are embroidered in gold and silver thread on velvet so dense it absorbs rather than reflects light. A single manto can take years to complete.

The workshops that make them, some operating continuously for five centuries, use techniques that haven’t fundamentally changed:

Thread laid by hand

Stitch by stitch, in patterns that are architectural in their logic

Axial symmetry

Repeat units

Botanical motifs

All unfolding from a centre point in exact geometric progressions. The discipline is as rigorous as any tiled surface. It operates through the needle rather than the kiln.

What the embroiderers understand that most makers don’t have to think about: velvet pile catches light differently depending on angle.

This is not an accident they work around. It is a property they design toward. The positioning of the goldwork is calculated for a surface in motion, seen from below, in candlelight.

That specificity of brief is what makes it instructive. Every decision — the direction of a stitch, the density of a motif, the weight of thread — is made in service of a context that is nocturnal, mobile, and collective. The embroiderer in the workshop is designing for a street she cannot see from her table. The object that is made will look wrong anywhere except that street, at that hour, in that light.

That is what a specific brief produces. Constraints that generate its character.

GOLD LEAF

The Cristo pasos are covered in gold leaf applied to the carved wood frame and canopy of the float. Not gilded details — gold as the primary surface, so that what moves through the street at night is a structure of warm, matte, distributed light.

Gold leaf used this way is a material argument, not a decorative one. Matte gold at scale catches every available light source and radiates it softly outward. In candlelight specifically — low, warm, flickering, moving — it behaves unlike any other surface. A paso in dark wood and silver would recede. In gold leaf it becomes visible at distance, through smoke and movement and the mass of people between the object and the eye. The material solves a technical problem: how do you make a large object legible at night, in a dense crowd, without electricity?

This is gold used the way the Byzantines used it in mosaic — not to communicate wealth but to communicate presence. To make a surface do something optically that no other material does in that context. It is a functional choice that happens to be magnificent.

We are cautious, in our own work, of gold used as assertion — gold that says expensive before it says anything else. But gold that solves a problem of light and legibility, gold chosen because of what it does rather than what it means — that is a material decision we respect completely.

WAX, FLOWERS, AND THE QUESTION OF DURATION

In the days before each procession, the pasos are dressed with fresh flowers — thousands of them, placed by hand across the platform. Colour relationships considered, density varied to create depth. They will last one night. By morning they are already closing, and within days they are removed.

The wax accumulates differently. The long candles carried through the streets drip continuously, and by morning certain cobblestones read like a record of the night’s route — thicker deposits where a procession paused, thin lines where it moved, occasional pools where a candle rested on a ledge. By the following day the streets are swept. The wax is gone.

Taken together — the carved figures locked in a church for fifty-one weeks, the embroidered manto folded in a chest, the fresh flowers, the melting wax, the gold leaf seen by artificial light for eight nights a year — the paso represents an extraordinary compression of craft investment into a brief duration of use. Years of making for hours of appearance.

This is what we meant, and should have said plainly, by “built to disappear”: not that the object is destroyed, but that its entire craft standard is calibrated to a moment rather than to permanence. The paso is not trying to last. It is trying to be exact, for one night, under specific conditions. Duration is simply not the measure.

That inversion is worth sitting with. In architecture, permanence is often used as the argument for quality — we specify stone over tile because it will outlast the building’s first owner, we detail the joinery because it will be seen for decades. Duration earns the craft standard.

The paso removes that logic entirely. The craft standard is not earned by duration. It is demanded by the moment — by the conditions of use, by the specificity of the brief, by the people who will stand in front of it and look. The object has to be exactly right for one night. That is sufficient reason.

We find that clarifying. Not because we work in the temporary — we don’t — but because it separates two things that architecture tends to conflate: the argument for quality, and the argument for permanence. They are not the same argument. One is about what the object owes the moment. The other is about what it owes time.

The paso knows the difference.

Material World is our ongoing series on the objects, surfaces and substances that shape how we live, seen from inside the studio, and from the edges of the field. Each episode, one material. Each material, one question it’s been waiting to answer.

If someone sent you this —> welcome. This is what we do here.

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We didn’t arrive at vintage through nostalgia. We arrived through frustration.

Vintage objects exist outside any current market conversation. They have no brand page, no stockist list, no algorithm surfacing them to someone else the same week. In a room meant to feel personal and considered, that untraceability is one of the most valuable things an object can have.

But that’s only part of the story.

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The manufacturing window for genuinely well-made furniture closed for most categories sometime in the eighties. What was produced before that was made differently. Not always beautifully. But structurally honestly. You feel it when you sit in it. You feel it when you move it.

And then there’s what vintage does to a room’s sense of time.

A room furnished entirely in new objects exists in one moment. It has no depth. Introduce one piece with a different history and the room’s timeline shifts. It starts to feel like someone with taste lived here before you.

That spatial intelligence is one of the hardest things to manufacture from scratch.

THE PROBLEM WITH NEW

We’re not against new. We specify new constantly: joinery, stone, upholstery, lighting.

But new objects are designed for the general case. They’re optimised for the catalogue image, the showroom light, the buyer who hasn’t yet committed to a space.

What they rarely account for is specificity.

Vintage pieces carry friction in the right places. A slight heaviness. An edge that doesn’t quite behave. A patina that answers the wall without discussion. That friction is actually compatibility. They sit on top of the room rather than inside it.

HOW WE LOOK

The first thing we abandoned was browsing.

Browsing produces nothing useful. You exhaust yourself on volume and come away with a shortlist of maybes that don’t belong to any project in particular. The eye learns to like things out of context, which is a dangerous habit in design.

We look with a specific room in mind. Always.

Before we open a single app or walk into a market, we know what we’re solving for. A problem stated clearly is a search conducted efficiently.

• The material register of the space.

• The scale gap.

• The temperature we need to bring [i.e. warmth, weight, geometry]

The first pass is scale and form. Does this thing have the right body for the room? Not approximate, right. Scale errors are almost impossible to correct in vintage because you’re working with fixed dimensions. A piece 10cm too small reads as shy. 10cm too large reads as aggressive. There’s a narrower band of tolerance than most people expect.

The second pass is material. Can it live alongside what’s already there? Not match, live alongside. We’re not sourcing sets. We’re sourcing cohabitants.

The third pass is condition. And this is where most people make expensive mistakes.

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ON CONDITION

Most people buy vintage for the patina. The worn edge, the aged surface, the thing that looks like it has lived somewhere interesting.

That’s real. But it’s the least important part.

Condition also means structure. A small list of things to look at:

• Joinery integrity.

• Upholstery that can be relined without reconstructing the frame.

• A veneer that hasn’t lifted at a point that can’t be reached.

• Rust that is surface rather than load-bearing.

These are decisions that look fine in a photograph and become problems in a room.

We always look at pieces in person where possible. We handle them. We press joints. We lift corners. We run a hand along the underside where no one intended it to be seen which is almost always where the truth of a piece lives.

Pro tip: When we’re sourcing remotely, we ask for specific images no buyer usually requests: underneath the seat, behind the leg, the interior of a drawer. The sellers who answer quickly, without resistance, are usually the ones whose pieces are genuinely what they claim.

WHERE WE SOURCE

We source everywhere, which means we have learned to be disciplined about where we actually spend time.

Density is the enemy of finding. Markets stacked with inventory flatten the eye. You stop seeing individual things and start managing volume. The places worth returning to are the ones where someone has already made an editorial decision about what to keep.

In London, a few places earn consistent visits.

Gonnermann in Highgate is a third-generation operation. Julian has been sourcing from across Europe for over thirty years specialising in Scandinavian and British 20th-century design. Many pieces come directly from private homes, fresh to market, never previously traded.

The Peanut Vendor in Bow restocks weekly, sourced from across the continent: Bauhaus, Art Deco, industrial. Worth following closely rather than visiting occasionally. The best pieces move fast.

M. Kardana in Hackney specialises in 20th-century European design: steel constructivist forms, minimalist postmodern chairs, abstract sculpture. Pieces that hold their own against strong architecture without competing with it.

Beyond London, we look in auction rooms that don’t primarily handle furniture, industrial equipment, scientific instruments, nautical objects. The scale relationships are different. The materials are different. The surprise, when it arrives, is different.

The discipline is not about location. It’s about the quality of attention you bring to wherever you’re looking.

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WHAT WE’VE LEARNED NOT TO DO

• Don’t buy a piece because it’s rare. Rarity is a market argument, not a design argument. A piece can be genuinely rare and entirely wrong for any room you will ever design.

• Don’t buy a piece in the hope that you’ll find a room for it later. Unless you have specific storage, a deep client base, and an unusually long horizon, this is a path that ends in a warehouse of decisions deferred.

• Don’t trust your eye alone in a market. Bring photographs of the actual room. Not a mood board the actual walls, the actual floor, the actual light conditions. The eye is extraordinarily capable of convincing you that something will work when it is presented beside things it will never be placed beside.

There’s a moment with the right vintage piece when it stops being an object you placed and becomes part of how the room has always been.

Its specific weight, material memory, particular relationship to light all of it answers something the new elements in the room were silently asking for.

It doesn’t happen every time. It doesn’t happen quickly. But when it does, the room closes in the right way.

IN PRACTICE is our ongoing series on how the studio actually works — the methods, the decisions, the things we’ve learned throughout time.

We learned it slowly through bad outcomes, misread drawings, and objects that arrived technically correct and entirely wrong. A craftsman is not a machine you program. The relationship requires something closer to translation: converting spatial intention into language that can be held, understood, and carried back to a workshop.

This is what no one teaches you in architecture school.

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THE WEIGHT OF VAGUENESS

Early on, we briefed the way we had been taught to: dimensions, sections, materials, tolerances. Precise on paper. The drawings were clear. The pieces that came back were accurate and lifeless.

What the drawings could not carry was the feeling. The reason the radius on that edge existed. What we were trying to make the space do. Why one millimetre of reveal would have changed everything.

A craftsman working from drawings alone is working blind to intention. They fill the gaps with their own assumptions, their own habits, the shorthand of their trade. Sometimes those assumptions are good. Often they produce work that is correct in every measurable way and wrong in every intuitive one.

THE CONVERSATION BEFORE THE DOCUMENT

Now we begin every craftsman relationship with a conversation before we send anything.

We talk about the piece in the space. We describe what the room feels like, what the client’s life feels like. We talk about light and weight and what we want someone to feel when they first put their hand on a surface. We talk about what we don’t want, which is often more specific than what we do.

Only then do we share drawings. By that point, the drawings are not instructions but confirmation of something already understood.

This changes what a craftsman brings back. When they feel trusted to understand, they tend to exceed what you asked for. When they feel like a machine given coordinates, they meet them. The difference between those two outcomes is not money or time. It is the quality of the conversation that preceded the work.

WHAT A GOOD BRIEF CONTAINS

It contains the obvious: material specifications, dimensions, tolerances, finish references, installation sequence. A craftsman needs to know what they are making.

But a brief that stops there is incomplete.

A good brief for us contains three things that rarely appear in standard documentation:

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The why of every decision.

Not as a lengthy explanation just a single sentence. This edge is soft because everything else in the room is hard. This depth matters because of how the light hits it in the afternoon. When a craftsman understands the reason for a choice, they protect it. When they don’t, they negotiate it away.

A reference for touch.

We ask craftsmen to hold or look at something, a piece of stone, a piece of furniture, a handle, a surface, that carries the quality we are after. Not necessarily the same material. The same feeling.

Language is imprecise; sensation is not.

An explicit invitation to question.

We tell every craftsman at the start: if something in this brief doesn’t make sense, or if you can see a better way to achieve what we’re describing, we want to know before you proceed. Not after. The problem with most projects is not that craftsmen have doubts, it’s that no one created the conditions for those doubts to surface.

THE MATERIAL NEGOTIATION

Every brief involves negotiation. Materials behave differently at scale, in different climates, under different workshop conditions. A stone that reads beautifully in a slab will read differently once it is edge-profiled and jointed. A lacquer that works on a sample will read differently across a four-metre door panel.

We have learned to treat the brief as the beginning of a material conversation, not the end of it. We invite craftsmen into the problem early enough that they can shape the solution.

The best work we have produced has come from those moments. where a stone mason tells us he can achieve the shadow gap we want but it will need to be cut differently, where a carpenter tells us the curve we’ve drawn will require a lamination method that will actually produce a better result than what we’d originally specified.

These are not compromises. They are the collaboration becoming visible.

WHAT WE ARE REALLY BRIEFING

We are not briefing an object. We are briefing a person on a standard.

There is a quality of attention that we need every person who touches a project to understand. The way we think about detail, the reason a joint is designed the way it is, the reason we have specified something unusual or difficult, all of that needs to be legible in the brief, not just in the drawing.

A craftsman who understands the standard will self-correct. They will catch the discrepancy before it becomes a site problem. They will call us when something is not resolving the way it should. They will hold the intention of the piece even when we are not in the room.

That is what we are trying to produce: not compliance with a document, but a shared understanding of what we are making and why it matters.

THE TRUST PROBLEM

There is a version of briefing that is about control, a sort of exhaustive documentation designed to leave no room for interpretation or failure. We understand the instinct. On high-budget projects, the stakes of a mistake are real.

But total control is also total limitation.

The brief that accounts for every eventuality leaves no room for the craftsman to bring what they know, which is often more, in their domain, than we know ourselves.

We have found that the best craftsmen are also the ones most likely to push back on a brief they don’t agree with. And they are almost always right. The relationship has to be built for that pushback to happen, a culture of mutual respect between designer and maker, rather than the old hierarchy of instruction and execution.

There is a version of Casablanca you carry before you arrive.

It lives in the imagination — in old films, in the mythology of the port, in the way people say the name with a slight pause, as if they’re not quite sure what it means anymore. The white city. A city of transit and contradiction.

Then you land. And the city you find is something else entirely. Denser. Louder. More alive.

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We have a complicated relationship with Casablanca. It is a city we know through family, through memory, through the particular quality of light in late afternoon when it falls across limestone facades and you feel, briefly, that you are inside something ancient and contemporary at the same time. This is not a city we discovered. It is a city we keep returning to — and each time, we see more of it.

THE ART DECO CITY

In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, Casablanca was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. The French Protectorate was pouring investment into it, and the architects who came — mostly young, mostly trained in Paris, many of them drawn by the scale of the opportunity — brought with them the vocabulary of Art Deco and applied it to a North African city with a particular kind of creative licence.

What they built was unlike anything else:

buildings that carry the language of European modernism in their massing and ornamental logic, but inflected at the detail level with Moroccan craft traditions

• geometric tile inserts

• carved stucco

• the proportions of Moorish arched windows.

Walking through the old city, you encounter these buildings in accumulation. That is the important word. No single building announces itself as a monument. The effect is collective — street after street of four and five-storey facades, their decorative ironwork still intricate above eye level, their cornices still carrying carved ornament, their entrance lobbies still tiled in patterns that speak fluently of both traditions at once.

Many of them are in an advanced state of decay. Plaster falling from facades, shutters warped and salt-bleached, the ground floors long since converted to uses the buildings were never designed for. And yet the details remain. You look up and find a balcony railing of such precision that you wonder what the building looked like at the moment of its completion, and then you realise that the decay has done something interesting to it — stripped away the newness, made the craft visible in a different way, turned it into something you have to work to see.

The contrast with the older medina fabric is not jarring in the way you might expect. The medina sits alongside and beneath the Art Deco city — narrower streets, different scales, the logic of a much older urban order — and the two coexist in a way that feels less like collision and more like sedimentation. Layer upon layer, each visible, none erasing the other. Walking from one into the other is a spatial lesson in how cities actually grow, as opposed to how they are imagined to grow.

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BEHIND EVERY DOOR

The medina gives nothing from the street. That is its architecture.

We spent hours in the souk — not browsing, but looking. A dealer in brass and old ironwork, his stall spilling under horseshoe arches, objects accumulated over decades stacked against whitewashed walls. We found the Beni Ourain rug we had been searching for — a deep green, the pattern unmistakable — and bought it for a project. It now sits in a London space and carries something of this city in it, though no client will ever know that.

The doors of the medina stopped us repeatedly. Not as surfaces but as objects of thought — the cedar carved to a depth that makes you wonder how many hours, how many hands. A fanlight of plasterwork geometry floating above a threshold. The threshold itself as architecture. Every entrance a compressed lesson in how a building can prepare you for what is inside, can change your register before you even cross it.

We are still thinking about those doors.

THE IMPERIAL AND THE EVERYDAY

The Quartier des Habous was built in the 1930s as a planned medina — a Moroccan spatial logic executed by French architects, an entire neighbourhood designed from scratch to house a traditional urban life.

The result is extraordinary and slightly uncanny: streets that feel ancient and are not, arches that feel discovered and were calculated, a silence that feels earned and was planned.

Café Impérial sits within it like something that has always been there. Moorish arches with star-pattern grilles. An awning in cream and sand. The day we visited, a single white plastic chair sat alone in the arcade, and the café was closed — and somehow this made it more beautiful, not less. A space resting. Waiting. The mundane detail of a plastic chair against eight hundred years of Islamic geometric ornament is the kind of collision Casablanca offers constantly, if you are paying attention. It never apologises for the contradiction. Neither should you.

A Creative Quarter

In the Maarif creative quarter, the moroccan Artist Hassan Hajjaj and famous football player Achraf Hakimi had opened Café Juj — a pop-up in the fullest sense, a space that is part café, part concept store, part cultural provocation. The walls carry Hajjaj’s signature: photographs framed not in gallery white but in sardine tins, repetition as rhythm, the vernacular elevated until it becomes something else entirely. Bold colour. Pattern on pattern. The pop aesthetic pushed until it folds back into something that feels ancient.

We had coffee. We played Jenga. We sat in a space that was doing something genuinely new with Moroccan identity — not preserving it, not performing it, but using it as living material. The name itself, Juj, means two in Darija. Two people, two worlds, one room. There is a lesson in that for design, for practice, for how cultural references can be held without becoming decoration.

We left three days later with a Beni Ourain rug, a head full of unresolved ideas, and the particular feeling this city always leaves us with — that we have only just begun to see it.

A generational shift is reshaping the collector’s market. Younger collectors, many in their twenties and thirties (including us), are entering the field with different values and buying patterns than their predecessors. This isn’t just about taste shifting. It’s about who decides what matters, and how.

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Across our conversations at Collect, we’ve noticed galleries are moving away from purely market-driven presentations. They’re curating differently now. Rather than chasing the biggest names at the highest prices, booths are setting stages for

Conversation, context and access.

What struck us most: galleries offering work at accessible price points, starting at £400, allowing young collectors to enter and build methodically. Not as spectators. As participants.

This week, we’re uncovering what young collectors are actually acquiring, where they’re shopping, at what price points, and why this moment is reshaping the entire ecosystem.

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On our desks this month: burnished metal, deep stone, woven neutrals, a handful of conversations about discipline and infrastructure, and a few objects (in fashion and in space) that understand the power of restraint.

There’s a fair where craft feels radical again, a podcast about building something that lasts, and pieces that hold warmth without noise.

Everything here shares the same thread:

Controlled heat.
Material depth.
Structure with softness.

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A RECALIBRATION

Much of what’s on our radar lately feels like a recalibration.

We’re paying attention to objects that feel structurally resolved: stone with depth rather than surface effect, metal that will age rather than shine, textiles that absorb light instead of competing with it.

Hospitality is picking up on it. We're eyeing Chef Endo's pop-up in Annabel's. No fluff. Just precision.

In fashion, the same instinct is visible.

Fashion Show tailoring this year has returned to its architectural roots. At the Ralph Lauren show: elongated coats, controlled silhouettes, deep browns, oxblood, and restrained eveningwear that felt composed rather than theatrical. There was warmth, but it was disciplined. Leather, velvet, structured wool. Nothing frantic. Nothing ironic.

The collectible design market mirrors this.

THE DISCIPLINE OF OBJECTS

This week, we’re at Collect watching artists who are doing something rare: We’ve got our eyes on Kobina Adusah at FUMI Gallery, Lewis Kemmenoe, and Zofia Sobolewska Ursic. Each piece is distilled to its essence.

What ties these three together is a methodology. Each is engaged in the work of asking: what is essential? Adusah’s approach to materiality, Kemmenoe’s understanding of form, Sobolewska Ursic’s consideration of space. None of it is decorative. There’s a clarity of purpose that feels increasingly rare.

This is where we’re placing our attention: creators who understand that less isn’t boring, it’s purposeful. In a market saturated with options and ornament, this reads as radical.

DESIGN AS EMPOWERMENT

We’ve been listening to Oh! She Can Drive, the hosts conversations about how people build businesses, create systems, establish intention. What strikes us: the thinking that creates a thriving business mirrors the thinking that creates a thriving space.

Design isn’t decoration. It’s infrastructure. It’s the choices you make about structure, materials, and what you leave out. When you apply that thinking, whether you’re shaping a room or building a startup, everything becomes clearer. Less friction. More possibility.

WHAT’S NEXT

We’ll be documenting our time at Collect this week. What structures are you building? What principles guide your choices? How are you translating this thinking into the spaces and systems around you?

Join us in the comments. We want to know what’s on your radar.

Dear Friends,

There is a staircase in Sydney that is never the same twice. A flagship in Paris that is secretly about Venice. And a question we’ve been sitting with in the studio for six months that led us, inevitably, here.

They share one material. One the industry has been quietly reaching for three years running, and still hasn’t fully explained why.

We think we know.

This week: glass bricks. The conversation everyone is having. And the one nobody has finished yet.

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You know that feeling when a room gets something right and you don’t immediately know why?

Not the furniture. Not the finish. Something structural. Something about the way the light behaves: slower than it should, softer than the architecture deserves. You stand in it longer than you planned. You leave and think about it on the way home.

We’ve been chasing that feeling for six months.

It led us here.

It started, as the best problems do, with a constraint.

A mezzanine inside one of Coal Drops Yard’s Victorian industrial bones. A building that arrived at the twentieth century with opinions intact: dark ironwork, brick that has absorbed a hundred and fifty years of London weather, ceilings that make you feel appropriately small in a way that is, somehow, a relief.

The structure asked for enclosure. Fire regulation, geometry, the logic of old buildings that have survived precisely because they don’t negotiate.

The mezzanine could not be left open. It had to become a room.

And so we stood inside the constraint, the way you stand inside any problem that matters, and waited for it to tell us what it needed.

(It always needs something. That’s the part they don’t teach you.)

What it needed was light that didn’t announce itself.

Something older than transparency. More considered than clarity.

Diffusion.

The slow pressure of light through something solid until it loses its edges. Until it stops being light and becomes warmth. Until the wall stops being a wall and becomes —> almost —> a presence.

We didn’t find the solution.

The solution had been waiting in the wall.

Watching us figure it out.

Glass Bricks.

The only honest answer to an honest question. One the building had been sitting with since 1870.

Here is what we didn’t fully understand about them until this project made us look properly.

A glass partition transmits. It gives you the view or it takes it away: privacy and light become a binary, a choice, an either/or that feels vaguely punishing. Every fingerprint a reminder of what the material costs you.

Glass bricks, however, do something else entirely.

They diffuse. They take light and spread it, not directing it somewhere but releasing it everywhere, slowly, evenly, the way heat leaves a body in sleep. They eliminate the cold bridge problem that makes standard glass feel clinical in winter, that makes a room feel like it’s holding you at arm’s length. They absorb sound rather than bouncing it back at you. And unlike a glass partition, which begins pristine and spends the rest of its life showing the evidence of being touched, a glass brick ages.

Slowly. In the direction of more interesting.

Part sculpture, part function.

(And part argument, if you’re willing to let a wall make one.)

They solve it in the body. In the part of you that knows, before your mind catches up, whether a room is on your side or not.

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The argument they’re making right now — in studios, flagships and exhibition halls — is consequently worth sitting with.

Consider Paris first. When Matthieu Blazy took the creative director’s chair at Bottega Veneta, his first public act was to fill the Avenue Montaigne flagship with walnut and glass bricks. Most people read it as aesthetic. It was, however, a thesis, dense, specific, quietly devastating if you knew where to look.

The bricks are native to Venice. The city where the house was born. The city whose entire identity is an argument about light and water and the surfaces that hold them both. The front door handle is by Ritsue Mishima, a Venetian glassmaker of Japanese origin, which, if you’ve been following this letter for any time, will not feel like a coincidence.

The whole building is secretly a meditation on diffusion. Material, cultural, geographic. Most people who visited felt something they couldn’t name.

That is precisely what glass bricks do.

That is, in fact, the point of them.

Meanwhile in Sydney, Ellison Studios built their permanent flagship around a glass-brick staircase, a daily climb that is never identical twice. The light shifts with the hour. The translucency shifts with the season. What the staircase is depends entirely on when you use it. Function and sculpture refusing, politely but firmly, to be separated.

And in Venice, WonderGlass staged The Brick House at the Architecture Biennale: a laboratory-exhibition that gathered architects, craftsmen and designers not, notably, to celebrate a revival, but to ask what the material still had left to say.

The answer, it turned out, was considerable.

Architects Catie Newell and Alli Hoag went furthest, developing an entirely novel form of glass brick that pushes past its own inheritance. The pressed utilitarian geometry of the 1980s. The hollow blown-glass Falconnier bricks of the 1930s,those early iridescent forms that looked almost organic, almost alive, nothing like the object we think we remember when we hear the word.

What Newell and Hoag proposed was, essentially, a glass brick with no interest in where it came from.

This is, therefore, the real story. The revival already happened, already peaked, already became a reference on mood boards that no longer feel urgent. What’s left is something quieter and more durable.

We live — all of us, not just the people who commission studios like ours, inside a new and still-unresolved relationship with enclosure. The home stopped being backdrop somewhere around 2020 and became, without asking permission, a protagonist. We needed our spaces to hold us without swallowing us. To separate without isolating. To let light move through our days even when we couldn’t move through the world.

What does enclosure owe to the people living inside it?

We’ve been asking ourselves this for months now. In the studio, in the mezzanine, in the space between a problem and its answer.

Our wall isn’t finished yet. The bricks haven’t been laid. The light we are designing toward is still theoretical — a quality we can describe precisely but haven’t yet stood inside of.

And yet we already know what it will feel like.

Warm. Diffused. Solid and permeable at once.

Material World is our ongoing series on the objects, surfaces and substances that shape how we live, seen from inside the studio, and from the edges of the field. Each episode, one material. Each material, one question it’s been waiting to answer.

If someone sent you this —> welcome. This is what we do here.

Subscribe to receive the next one.

Next episode —> we haven’t told you yet. But you’ll recognise it the moment we name it. everything on the other side of a wall that has finally stopped pretending to be one.

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Before a single wall comes down, before the contractor’s truck arrives, there’s a moment most people miss entirely. It’s quiet. It’s easy to overlook. And it determines everything about the space you’re about to create.

We learned this the expensive way on a project where we arrived on hour two instead of hour one. By the time we got there, the contractors had already ripped out the original stone skirting—the exact material we’d planned to preserve and refinish. Gone. In a skip. Irretrievable. No one had marked it. No one had documented it. No one had been there to say: stop, this stays.

The renovation proceeded. The space turned out beautiful by most measures. But every time we visit, we see the ghost of that stone skirting. The room lost something it can never get back—not because stone is precious, but because that material was part of the building’s original language. Removing it was like deleting a paragraph from a manuscript. The story still makes sense, but it’s thinner.

Here’s what no one tells you: the material imprint of a space is set in the first 48 hours on site, long before anyone swings a hammer. Most people treat day one as a logistical checkpoint—a walkthrough with the contractor, some measurements, maybe clearing out debris.

But here’s what we’ve learned after years on site:

Day one isn’t about logistics. What you bring to that first visit, the objects, the habits, the quality of attention, that’s what separates spaces people tolerate from spaces people never want to leave.

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WHY THE FIRST 48 HOURS MATTER

The problem with most renovations is that they begin with demolition, not documentation. The construction crew shows up, starts tearing things out, and by the time the designer arrives, half the material culture of the space is already gone. But here’s what people don’t understand:

Every layer of paint, every repair, every material choice tells you something about how the space has been lived in. Original floorboards show you traffic patterns—where people walked, where they lingered, where they never went. Hardware tells you what mattered enough to upgrade. Wear patterns on stone thresholds reveal which rooms were the heart of the house.

This isn’t romantic preservation for its own sake. It’s practical intelligence. If you know how a space has been used, you can design with the grain of the building instead of against it. You can preserve the materials that are doing their job and replace the ones that aren’t. You can make decisions based on evidence, not assumptions.

But only if you document before you demolish.

The projects that work—the ones where the finished space feels coherent, lived-in, right—all start the same way. They begin with careful observation. The ones that fail? They start with a dumpster.

HOUR ONE: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING (Before It's Gone)

We arrive before demolition starts. Before anyone picks up a sledgehammer. We walk the space. Really look at it. Touch the walls. Notice the materials.

We photograph everything. Not just the pretty bits. Everything. The layers of wallpaper. The old electrical. The stains and cracks and repairs. These are evidence. They tell us how the building has lived.

We identify what stays. Physically mark it. Blue painter’s tape. Permanent marker. Clear labels. We don’t assume anyone will remember what we said in a meeting two weeks ago. We mark it on the actual material. We don’t rely on email or marked-up drawings alone.

We document materials worth salvaging. Original floorboards. Good brick. Stone. Hardware. We measure them. Photograph them. Calculate quantities. Make a plan for reuse before demolition starts.

Because once something is demolished, it’s gone. There’s no undo button on a construction site.

Hours Three to Twelve: The Clearing

Here’s where most renovations go wrong: they treat demolition as erasure. Rip it out, haul it away, start fresh. But we’ve learned that demolition done right isn’t destruction—it’s curation. You’re not erasing; you’re deciding what the building carries forward.

We salvage pieces with intention. A beam from the original structure becomes a mantel. Brick from a torn-down wall becomes a courtyard path. Floorboards get milled into shelving. Not because it’s trendy or sustainable (though it is both), but because it maintains material memory. The building remembers itself through its own materials.

The space needs to remember what it was so it knows what it's becoming.

working differently—more carefully, more respectfully allows for the building to stop feeling like a construction zone and start feeling like a transformation in progress.

Hours Twelve to Forty-Eight: Setting the Standard

By the second day, we’ve documented everything. We’ve identified what stays. Now comes the most important part: establishing how the work will be done.

This is where most designers lose control of a project. They assume the contractor knows what they want. They assume “careful demolition” means the same thing to everyone. They assume they can show up once a week and everything will be fine.

We’ve learned: you set the tone in the first 48 hours, or the construction site sets it for you.

We mark walls ourselves with clean lines. Clear annotations. “SAVE - original floorboards.” “DEMO to here only.” “Expose brick, don’t remove.” We don’t email these instructions. We don’t just put them in the drawings. We write them directly on the walls where the crew will see them every single day.

We talk to the site foreman directly. Not in an office, but standing in the actual space, pointing at actual materials. “This stays. This goes. This we’ll decide about later.” We make sure they understand we’ll be here regularly.

The construction team will work to whatever standard you set. If you treat the building like a teardown, they’ll treat it like a teardown. If you treat it like an archive that’s being carefully edited, they’ll work with more care. The difference is established in the first two days.

The Buildings That Last

The buildings that endure aren’t necessarily the most expensive or the most ambitious. They’re the ones that were loved carefully from the beginning.

They’re the buildings where someone paid attention to what was already there before deciding what should come next. Where original materials were preserved not because of rigid conservation rules, but because they were better than anything you could buy new. Where demolition was done carefully, not carelessly. Where the construction crew understood they were transforming something, not just tearing it apart.

This is what day one is really about. Not rituals or symbolic gestures. It’s about beginning with intelligence. With care. With respect for what the building has been and consciousness about what it’s becoming.

Because the building remembers.

Not mystically. Materially. In its wear patterns and its salvaged materials and its carefully preserved details.

And fifty years from now, when someone else renovates this space, they’ll read your work the same way you’re reading the building now. The question is: what will your renovation tell them?

It starts before the work starts.

It starts with you, standing in an empty room, really looking, deciding what stays.

SHOP: The Site Essentials Kit

So what do we actually bring to day one? Not the obvious things—hard hats and clipboards exist on every construction site. We’re talking about the tools that separate a careful renovation from a careless one, the objects that communicate seriousness to your team, the equipment that forces you to see what actually matters.

• A film camera

  Not a phone. We use a Voigtlaender vito. Film forces selectivity. Every shot has to be developed later, so you only photograph what actually matters. This changes how you see the space, you start noticing what’s essential instead of capturing everything and deciding later.

• Rotring 600, full stop. A technical pen that writes clean, precise lines on walls, on tape, on wood, on concrete. We also keep a Muji retractable black gel pen for note-taking - cheap enough to lose, good enough to use daily.

• Drawings in a tube

  Actual printed drawings, rolled properly in a poster tube (we like the ones from London Graphics Center because they’re indestructible). There’s something about unrolling a physical drawing on site, spreading it across a floor, pointing at actual lines while standing in the space. It makes the design real in a way a screen can’t.

• Proper clothes and shoes

  Cotton shirts from COS in black or white: comfortable, durable, not precious but not sloppy. We specifically like their heavy cotton tees and relaxed Oxford shirts. For shoes: Prada Monolith boots or their chunky Derby shoes in black. They can handle construction debris, and they’re genuinely comfortable for hours of standing.

• A measuring tape and field notebook

  For notes: a Moleskine Cahier notebook in the large size, squared paper. Not for design sketches (that’s what the drawings are for), but for material notes. “Original pine floorboards, 120mm wide, 20mm thick” “Hand-cut limestone threshold.” These details matter later when you’re sourcing new materials or trying to match existing ones.

And one thing that’s on our wishlist recently:

• Small speaker (a Teenage Engineering OB-4) for playing music during documentation. Not for atmosphere—for memory. We’ve found that playing specific music while photographing a space helps us remember the feeling of the space later when we’re designing. The OB-4 also has a radio and can record, so we can capture ambient sound—traffic noise, bird songs, the particular acoustic of empty rooms. It sounds eccentric, but these recordings help us make decisions about acoustics and materials months later.

These tools last for years, and more importantly, they communicate something essential: this renovation matters. We’re not winging it. We came prepared.

And that preparation, that visible care, sets the tone for everything that follows.

Not because it’s productive.
But because it tells you the truth.

Making has a way of clarifying things.

Not in theory, not on paper, but in the moment something has to exist, hold, and stay.

We were reminded of this while working on a collaboration with N9CRA.

We were making hand-made displays for silver pieces. Nothing complex. Nothing loud. Just forms meant to support, not compete.

On paper, it all felt resolved.
Simple geometries. Neutral surfaces. Everything behaved.

Then we started making them.

Once the objects existed, the questions shifted.
How the jewellery rested.
How it caught the light.
How much weight the display needed, and how much it didn’t.

What looked right in drawings only made sense once it was in the hand.

That’s usually the moment to pay attention.

Because you don’t really understand an idea until you try to make it
when it resists, when it pushes back, when it starts telling you what it wants to be.

Inside our studio, that’s where the work really begins.
It’s where ideas stop performing and start telling the truth.

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THICKNESS VS WEIGHT

Thickness is measurable.
Weight is felt.

You can draw thickness. You can specify it. You can justify it on paper.

But weight only reveals itself when something is made.

That difference shapes how we work.

In the studio, weight becomes a filter.
It decides what survives and what doesn’t.

Ideas that feel convincing on screen often dissolve the moment they’re built.
Edges soften. Proportions shift. What felt resolved becomes uncertain.
Making forces the conversation to move from appearance to consequence.

This is why we return to physical studies early.
Not to test aesthetics, but to test conviction.

Weight tells us when something has presence: when it no longer needs explanation.
and can stand quietly without being defended.

It affects how we choose materials,
size details and remove rather than add.

If something relies on thickness to feel important, it doesn’t last.
However, if it carries weight, it holds.

That distinction influences every decision we make: from structure to finish.
We’re less interested in how much something occupies space, and more in how it inhabits it.

In practice, this means fewer gestures and stronger decisions.
Less visual noise.
More clarity.

Weight teaches restraint.
And restraint, in our studio, is what gives work its authority.

SPEED VS QUALITY

Speed feels good at first.
It gives the illusion of control.

You move quickly. You decide quickly. Things come together fast.
On paper, everything aligns.

But the moment something is made, speed shows its limits.

Edges feel rushed.
Proportions feel unresolved.
Details ask questions you didn’t want to answer yet.

In the studio, we’ve learned that quality announces itself differently.
It doesn’t arrive all at once.
It appears slowly, through repetition, hesitation, correction.

Quality shows up when something is adjusted instead of accepted.
When a detail is remade.
When a decision is delayed because it hasn’t earned its place yet.

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Speed wants closure.
While quality wants accuracy.

This is another aspect that affects how we work every day.
We allow things to stay open longer than is comfortable.
To revisit models.
To remake pieces that were “good enough”.

Maybe it’s Mediterranean instinct, but we’ve learned that rushing always leaves traces.

Quality isn’t slower by choice.
It’s slower because it’s precise.

And precision takes time.

FINISH VS PATINA

In the studio, this distinction guides many of our decisions.

Some materials are designed to stay the same.
They resist marks. They reject wear.
They ask to be preserved.

Others are different.
They soften.
They deepen.
They record use instead of hiding it.

Patina isn’t damage.
It’s evidence.

It shows where hands rested.
Where light passed repeatedly.
Where time was allowed to leave a trace.

This is why we’re drawn to materials that don’t fear change — timber, fibre, clay, paper.
They don’t insist on perfection.
They allow life to participate.

Designing for patina means accepting that the work won’t look the same forever.
And that’s not a loss.

It’s a form of trust.

Making reveals whether a material can age with grace.
Whether it improves through contact or collapses under it.

In the studio, we choose patina over finish because it keeps the work alive.
It allows the object or space to continue its story beyond us.

And that, ultimately, is where making becomes powerful.

Over time, making teaches you what to listen for.

Not what looks finished, but what feels right in the hand.
Not what comes together quickly, but what holds up after a second look.
Not what stays perfect, but what becomes better through use.

Inside our studio, these cues guide us quietly.
They shape how we choose materials, how long we sit with a decision, how much we’re willing to remove.

The power of making isn’t in control or certainty.
It’s in trust — in letting materials, time, and use do some of the work with you.

When something carries weight, earns its precision, and accepts change, it no longer asks for attention.

It simply stays.

Design trends come and go, but certain rooms, objects, and spatial instincts refuse to disappear.

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From Granada to Casablanca, from mid-century interiors to Japanese refinement, Decoding Decades explores why old architecture and craftsmanship continue to return not as nostalgia, but as design logic.

Today, we’re sharing a reflection on atmosphere, proportion, and the quiet intelligence that survives time.

Some spaces feel older than their walls.
Not aged — informed.

They carry a composure that doesn’t belong to a decade or a movement, but to repetition.
To gestures practiced long enough to lose urgency and gain clarity.

These rooms don’t announce themselves or explain their references.
They offer atmosphere first, trusting that attention will eventually arrive.

What we call old is often just patient.
What we call new is often just unfinished.

HOW ROOMS BEHAVE

You feel the difference immediately, at a sensory level.

• Light doesn’t bounce aggressively.
  It settles.

• Plaster absorbs shadow instead of denying it.

• Wood keeps its grain — uneven, materially honest.

There is temperature in these spaces:
cool where stone meets skin,
warmer where air has learned to linger.

Edges are softened not by design intent, but by use.
Corners don’t sharpen the eye.
They rest it.

The room doesn’t perform.
It behaves.

STRUCTURE REMEMBERS

This is where old architecture quietly outpaces contemporary spectacle.

It understood behaviour before it considered appearance.
Walls were thick because climate demanded it.
Courtyards existed to choreograph air, not views.
Thresholds mattered because movement mattered.

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These weren’t stylistic choices.
They were structural agreements between body, material, and place.

When these logics resurface today, it isn’t nostalgia.
It’s alignment being recognised again.

Design doesn’t disappear with time.
It waits.

CRAFT AS INFRASTRUCTURE

Craftsmanship sits at the centre of this continuity.

In places like Granada and Casablanca, craft was never an added layer or a decorative flourish.
It was infrastructure.

Stonecutters, tile makers, woodworkers operated not as artists, but as carriers of rhythm. Their work was shaped by repetition, discipline, and correction, a long process of editing where what didn’t resolve behaviour simply fell away.

Zellige was never about pattern alone.
It regulated light, cooled interiors, and introduced cadence into walls that would otherwise flatten atmosphere.

Carved plaster didn’t exist to impress.
It taught shadow how to move.

Craft in these cultures wasn’t expressive in the contemporary sense.
It was precise.
Quiet.
Demanding.

What endured was not the motif.
It was the logic beneath it.

This is why craftsmanship keeps returning.
It knows how to survive use.

OBJECTS THAT STAY

The same intelligence governs the interiors we trust.

Certain objects refuse to leave the room not because they are iconic, but because they remain accurate.

Eames chairs persist because they understand posture, weight, and pause.
Le Corbusier’s seating continues to reappear because it negotiates structure honestly — frame, skin, gravity held in agreement.

These pieces don’t dominate a space.
They stabilise it.

They leave room for air.
They respect negative space.

Good interiors aren’t collections of statements.
They are alignments.

Taste doesn’t emerge from what you add.
It gathers in what you allow to remain.

RETURN WITHOUT NOSTALGIA

Across cultures, what returns is rarely image.
It is behaviour.

In southern Spain and North Africa, architecture evolved around heat, privacy, and patience.

• Light was filtered rather than displayed.

• Movement unfolded through layers and transitions.

• Silence was treated as a spatial quality.

These environments weren’t designed to impress quickly.
They were designed to be lived in slowly.

That intelligence reads as contemporary now because it never depended on novelty.

REFINEMENT AS PROGRESS

Japan offers a parallel clarity.

There, design doesn’t move forward by replacement, but by refinement.
Ancient joinery informs modern detailing.
Tatami proportions quietly structure contemporary plans.

Imperfection isn’t erased.
It’s calibrated.

Design becomes a long conversation rather than a declaration.

The object never outweighs the atmosphere.
The gesture never outshouts the structure.

This is not restraint as aesthetic.
It is restraint as discipline.

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EDITING WHAT COMES NEXT

Strong design cultures don’t chase newness.
They cultivate continuity.

They understand seasonality
when to cut,
when to layer,
when to leave space untouched.

They treat space the way fashion treats tailoring:
construction first,
drape second,
editing always.

What survives decades is not what once impressed.
It’s what continues to behave well.

In the studio, this changes how we work.

We begin by looking longer.
Recognising patterns instead of references.
Extracting proportion instead of copying form.

Sketching becomes less about invention
and more about translation.

Taste reveals itself slowly.
As memory, not aspiration.

Designing the future is not predicting it.
It’s refining what already knows how to work.

Friends,

We wanted to share a few thoughts today on open plan living — and why separation is quietly re-entering the conversation.

Open plan spaces have done a lot of heavy lifting over the last few decades. They brought in light, loosened up layouts, and made homes feel more generous than their square metres suggested. At their best, they encourage flow, conversation, and a sense of ease.

They also set a certain expectation of togetherness.

But our homes are being asked to hold more than they used to. They’re no longer just places to gather at the end of the day. They’re where we work, rest, host, retreat, focus, and reset — often without much transition between those modes. And that overlap is starting to show.

What’s coming up again and again isn’t a rejection of openness.
It’s a desire for control.

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FLOW

Open plan was originally embraced for very human reasons — light, visibility, and ease of movement. Kitchens became the core of the home: where you cook, eat, talk, help with homework, and now sometimes work at a laptop. It was an architectural expression of togetherness.

Historically, this idea of flow isn’t new.

If you look at early modernist plans — particularly those by Le Corbusier — space was conceived as something continuous and liberated from heavy partitions. His open plans were meant to free the body, allowing movement, light, and air to circulate without obstruction.

Later, Mies van der Rohe pushed this even further. His domestic interiors were often defined less by walls and more by planes, furniture, and material shifts. The idea wasn’t emptiness — it was clarity.

There’s still a place for this kind of fluidity. When it works, it feels generous and connective. Spaces relate to one another easily. Life unfolds without complications.

But uninterrupted flow can also mean everything happens at once.

When planning open space, allow for moments of pause. Even small shifts — in layout, orientation, or use — can help a space breathe without losing its openness.

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FRICTION

That’s where friction emerges.
Not as a design problem, but as a lived one.

When activities overlap — work calls over dinner, screens humming in the background, daily life without clear edges — the home can start to feel like it’s always “on”.

The very qualities that once made open plan desirable — visibility and continuity — can become sources of tension if they aren’t balanced.

This tension isn’t just architectural; it’s cultural.
In painting, too, moments of rest are created not through emptiness but through contrast. Think of Giorgio Morandi — tightly composed still lifes where proximity creates calm, not chaos. Objects are close, but never competing.

Similarly, friction in space doesn’t need to be eliminated.
Used intentionally, it becomes a cue.

Instead of trying to smooth everything out, use friction deliberately.
It can signal a change in pace.
A shift in use.
A moment of transition between one part of the day and the next.

SEPARATION

Separation isn’t the same as closure.

When working with open layouts, lean into intentional delineation — ways of breaking a continuous space into parts without reverting to rigid, boxed-in rooms. Think of this less as dividing space, and more as tuning it.

This approach has strong precedents.

Traditional Japanese interiors, for example, rely on screens and sliding panels to define space without fixing it permanently. The work of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa continues this logic — where transparency, lightness, and separation coexist.

Lean on elements like:

• partial dividers that allow air, light, and sightlines to pass through

• shelving used as a threshold rather than a barrier

• subtle level changes, reveals, or material shifts that suggest a new zone

• screens and furniture layouts that create distinction without isolation

An extreme but beautiful example of how a divider can shape space, create pause, and still allow light and movement.

This kind of broken-plan logic, somewhere between open and closed, offers both clarity and connection. It allows different activities to coexist without competing for attention.

It’s less about dividing space, and more about giving it structure.

FLEXIBILITY

At the heart of this isn’t a rejection of open plan.
It’s a demand for flexibility that aligns with how we actually live.

Homes today are expected to be:

• workplaces

• places to rest and sleep

• social hubs

• quiet retreats

• spaces for meals, creativity, play, and focus

All within the same footprint.

Design for flexibility by allowing spaces to shift throughout the day.
Flexibility doesn’t mean everything happening everywhere. It means purposeful adaptability — knowing when to open things up, and when to introduce softness or separation.

Architects like Carlo Scarpa understood this instinctively. His interiors are layered, paced, and deeply attentive to thresholds — moments where one space yields to another. You’re never rushed through them. You’re guided.

Good flexible design doesn’t erase flow.
It channels it.

The most successful homes right now aren’t choosing sides.
They’re balancing openness with structure, and freedom with control.

Open plan and separation aren’t opposites. They’re tools.
Used together, thoughtfully and lightly, they help spaces get out of the way.

We don’t agree on everything.
That’s part of working together — and part of why things hold up.

What follows isn’t a manifesto or a list of recommendations.
It’s simply the things that tend to survive both of us. The ideas, habits, references, and tools that keep coming back into the studio, into our conversations, and into the way we live.

Architecture sits at the centre of it — but it’s never just architecture.

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Architecture

Architecture, for us, is not about statements.
It’s about sequence, proportion, light, and how a place feels after you’ve been there for a while.

We’re drawn to spaces that are calm without being empty, and expressive without being loud. Buildings that don’t rush to explain themselves. Rooms that allow life to happen without over-directing it.

Good architecture reduces friction.
It gives daily life a structure it can lean on.

AI

We’re interested in AI in the same way we’re interested in any tool: cautiously, practically, without romance.

Not as a replacement for judgement, but as something that can help us see patterns faster, test ideas earlier, and clear space for thinking. It’s useful when it sharpens decisions — not when it overwhelms them.

We care less about novelty and more about whether it actually improves the work, the pace, or the clarity of a project.

If it adds noise, we let it go.

Vintage sourcing

Old things matter to us — not because they’re nostalgic, but because they’ve already proven themselves.

We’re drawn to pieces with wear, with history, with a sense of having lived before arriving in a new space. Objects that bring weight and memory into rooms that might otherwise feel too new, too resolved.

Vintage sourcing is less about collecting and more about editing. Knowing when something earns its place, and when it doesn’t.

One good piece can do more than five new ones.

And the rest

The rest is where things connect.

How we organise the studio.
What we listen to while working.
When we step away.
What we eat.
How much we leave unsaid.

We prioritise the gym and eating properly, not as a routine to optimise, but as part of staying functional, focused, and consistent.

None of these things are separate from the work. They shape the pace, the tone, and the decisions just as much as drawings do.

What we agree on, ultimately, is this:
life and work aren’t opposing forces. When they’re aligned, everything feels easier — and better.

Friends,

Today, we want to talk about something that comes up more often than we admit.

The idea for this piece came from helping a friend furnish her home. She was excited — genuinely. Sending references, saving images, talking through what she loved. She has taste. She knows what she’s drawn to. The only frustration was that everything she wanted felt just slightly out of reach, all at once.

We talked through pieces the way designers always do: what would make the biggest difference, what could wait, what mattered more than it first appeared. A good light instead of another chair. One solid anchor piece rather than several compromises. The kind of thinking that isn’t about cutting back, but about choosing carefully.

What stayed with us was how familiar the feeling was. Wanting things to feel right. Wanting your space — and your life — to reflect what you care about. And feeling the tension when your taste moves faster than your means. But that tension isn’t a failure. It’s actually the beginning of design.

Before getting into anything else, we want to say this:

Having considered taste doesn’t mean you need to act on it all at once. And living well doesn’t require immediate completion.

When you slow the process down, something interesting happens. You start designing in phases. You learn what truly changes a space. You let things arrive over time. The result is often quieter, more personal, and far more durable than anything rushed.

In this piece, we share how we think about furnishing and living when things feel tight — how to prioritise, how to wait well, and how to keep small choices meaningful. Not as advice or rules, but as a way of approaching things that feels steady, considered, and human.

So, let’s start there.

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In Granada, winter doesn’t rearrange life.
It simply makes it clearer.

Days begin slowly, without negotiation. Waking happens in stages — sleep lingering, voices drifting through the house, greetings exchanged without urgency. Nothing is optimised. Nothing is planned too early. Morning arrives when it’s ready.

Eventually, we step outside.

Not to start the day —
but to continue it.

The street receives you immediately. Cold, yes. But sunny. Bright in that Andalusian way where light doesn’t warm the air, only the surfaces. Coffee comes next. Sometimes standing at the bar, quick, efficient, social. Sometimes seated, a tostada involved, depending on what the day asks of us — a familiar counter at Café Arrabal on some mornings, a longer pause, at home when sitting feels earned.

Granada doesn’t separate life into moments.
Everything overlaps.

WALKING AS METHOD

Walking in Granada is inevitable.

We walk because that’s how the city is stitched together. Because everything is uphill or downhill. Because plazas interrupt on route. Because monuments sit casually in the middle of errands — a cathedral passed on the way to meet someone, a gate crossed without comment, Plaza Nueva functioning less as a landmark than as a junction.

Walking here is repetitive by nature.
And repetition is the point.

We pass through the same plazas daily. We cross paths with people you know without arranging it. Certain neighbourhoods make this easier — El Realejo and El Albayzin, especially — where daily life and history sit together without hierarchy.

We step by centuries of architecture as if it were street furniture — a façade here, a threshold there, barely acknowledged.

Monuments don’t interrupt life.
They participate in it.

The body adjusts without thought. Pace adapts. Routes embed themselves into muscle memory. Walking isn’t reflective or recreational — it’s how life flows between places.

The city teaches us this quietly:
movement doesn’t need meaning to be meaningful.

Granada reveals itself through use, not observation. Through friction. Through incline. Through the way streets gather people naturally, then release them again.

The city’s intelligence is a constant, evolving source of inspiration — revealed through what feels entirely normal.

THE CITY’S WINTER PALETTE

Granada’s winter palette is warm without trying to be.

Stone leads the way — worn smooth underfoot, holding the sun long after the air turns cold. Limewashed walls carry age with ease. Nothing feels new; everything feels settled.

Wood anchors the interiors. Dark, warm, familiar. The kind you notice in small bars where counters hold the memory of elbows and conversations overlap — places like Bar Provincias, where material and social life feel inseparable.

Colour appears quietly. Earth tones. Dusty whites. Terracotta hints. Green from orange trees punctuating streets and squares — never decorative, always functional.

The city is cold, but visually warm.
Sunny, but not sharp.

The palette doesn’t perform. It supports. It allows shadow to exist without drama. It lets texture lead.

Colour here is not about expression.
It’s about continuity.

CORE ANDALUSIAN DESIGN

In Granada, the city’s intelligence lives closest to the everyday.

Buildings turn inward, but streets remain social. Courtyards regulate climate while squares regulate community. Architecture understands when to protect and when to open.

Mass matters. Thick walls hold warmth. Stone floors absorb the day. The city behaves thermally before it behaves visually.

Light is controlled, not maximised. Openings are measured. Interiors feel calm, even busy ones. Shadow is accepted as part of the composition.

Materials are honest because they have to be. Limewash cracks. Wood darkens. Metal wears. Everything shows use — not as character, but as proof of alignment.

Nothing is precious.
Everything is cared for.

Decoration is secondary. Proportion does the work. Repetition creates rhythm. Edges remain legible.

Design here is not a gesture.
It’s a habit.

Granada in winter is social, grounded, and unapologetically local.
What stays with us isn’t a highlight —
it’s a way of moving.

We return to cities like this because inspiration forms where life feels ordinary,
and because repetition sharpens how we see.

And Granada, in winter, feels exactly that —
ordinary in the way only deeply intelligent places are.

See you next week,