A Protective Structure Planted on the Rock: Castlecrag Courtyard by Downie North.Conceptually imagined as ‘a protective structure planted on the rock’, Downie North Castlecrag Courtyard house melds into the rugged topography in a way that one could easily mistake it for a luxurious cave or treehouse. With a...
Cocooned in Calm: An Apartment in São Paulo by André Braz.Bringing an old home into the present, for better or worse, means undoing a bit of the past. Or, if you’re architect André Braz, a lot of it. As he tells it, his latest project, a soup-to-nuts remodel of a 1970s, 134-square-metre...
Four Unique Coffee Shops to Break Your Doom Scroll.Ever walked into a coffee shop on the other side of the world and had the eerie feeling you’ve been there before? No longer just the hallmarks of Starbucks, homogeneous designed cafes can be found all over the world—yet these venues...
A Hybrid Creative Space in Paddington Blends Old With New.A careful restoration and restructuring of two buildings from different eras present a unique blending of old and new. Goodhope is Those Architects' latest renovation of a commercial creative office that invites a poetic demonstration of...
Dutch Courage: A Collectors home in Amsterdam by DAB Studio.If the aim of the 1910 Amsterdam School movement was to create a total architectural experience, inside and out, then DAB Studio has very successfully followed in those footsteps. Housed in an Amsterdam School building, the Collectors Home...
William McRoberts and Joseph Gardner Bring Serious Design Cred to Swop South Melbourne.Forget what you think you know about second-hand shopping. Conceived in collaboration with designer William McRoberts and Joseph Gardner of Studio Gardner, Swop South Melbourne draws on New York warehouse energy and a furniture edit that...
Intimate, Exacting, Subversive: Studio Plenty Reimagines Fine Jewellery Retail for Lindelli.Studio Plenty's debut interior for Sydney fine jewellery brand Lindelli strips retail convention bare. Compressed into just 17 square metres, the design replaces the traditional glass vitrine with something closer to a private salon. A...
Studio Doherty’s VRG GRL Bondi Store Balances Elevated Energy with Accessibility.Studio Doherty's design for VRG GRL Bondi Beach knows exactly when to whisper and when to shout. Mostly, it whispers — and then drops the carpet. Boom! Rather than a typical linear retail layout, the interior is designed as a sequence of...
Order Matter Architects Turn a Tiny Seoul Showroom Into an Urban Archive for Stone.The ST01 flagship in Seoul reframes how architectural stone is experienced in a retail setting. Rather than displaying samples under artificial light, Order Matter Architects drew inspiration from museum storage systems—suspending...
Margesherwood’s Seoul Flagship Is Part Retail Space, Part Sculpture Garden.Margesherwood's first flagship in Seoul's Seongdong-gu district isn't really a shop in any conventional sense. Designed by Studio Uneg, the two-storey space translates the Korean accessories brand's archive-driven sensibility into spatial...
Ice Cream Shop Slash Listening Bar Designed as a Kit of Parts Built to Move.Most retail fit-outs end up in a skip bin when the lease expires. Kori Windsor by Air Design Studio is a deliberate challenge to that norm. The 50sqm Windsor ice cream shop slash listening bar is conceived as a suite of relocatable...
Yugoslav Modernism Meets Japanese Listening Bars at Esthetic Joys Embassy Belgrade.There's a special kind of thrill in watching design pilgrims swerve away from the usual capitals toward cities with grittier stories to tell. Belgrade has been accumulating exactly this kind of momentum, and Esthetic Joys Embassy...
Audo Turns the Volume Down with Quiet Grandeur at 3daysofdesign.Quiet Grandeur argues that grandeur and calm aren't opposites—that an enduring idea of contemporary living can be grounded, graceful and quietly self-assured. After Monuments, it's a clever next move from Audo: less spectacle, more...
A Sydney RSL Institution Reimagined Without Losing Its Soul.After more than 75 years of service to veterans and the Rose Bay community, Club Rose Bay has reopened following its first major transformation since 1979. Led by Merivale with architecture and interiors by Akin Atelier, the project...
Per Cent’Anni: Pattern Studio’s Restaurant Built for a Hundred Years of Happiness.Pattern Studio sits firmly in my pantheon of favourite Australian practices, and Moby's Whale Beach is exactly why. A 60-seat Italian restaurant and downstairs wedding venue inside the 1937 Whale Beach Surf Life Saving Club, this is design...
Impertinence as a Design Strategy: Studio KO Brings the Legendary Bus Palladium Back to Life in Paris.Studio KO's Bus Palladium is not a hotel with a club, nor a club that decided to add rooms. It's something more interesting — an attempt to do for Paris what the Chelsea Hotel did for New York: a place where artists, musicians, and...
Alan Prekop Turns a Bratislava Heritage Space Into an Imagined Italian Terrace.This restaurant in Bratislava doesn't try to look Italian—it tries to feel Italian. Alan Prekop's concept inverts the spatial logic of the interior entirely, transforming the dining room into an imagined terrace in the narrow streets of...
A Surry Hills Terrace Where Friendship, Colour & Japanese Restraint Collide.Nearly ten years after meeting at another practice, Christine Rose Design and Studio Liu have finally built something together. Fitzroy, a transformed terrace in Sydney's Surry Hills, is the first collaboration between the two emerging...
A House That Doubles as a Museum: Lazzarini Pickering’s Casa Museo in Milan.Casa Museo is Lazzarini Pickering's latest: a Milan silversmiths' workshop reworked into a home that's also a gallery. Twin staircases, a conversation-pit-turned-cavea, a hidden vault and a dark pool—built for collectors Ettore Molinario...
Arent&Pyke Soften a Federation Home in Mosman with Curves, Colour and Slow-Crafted Stone.Few Australian studios have built a business as quietly assured as Arent&Pyke. At Bradleys Head House in Mosman, that same generosity of spirit fills every room—a Federation Arts and Crafts residence recast for a new generation, where...
Incomplete by Design: Ænsemble’s Country House by the River in Brandenburg.Heritage renovation lives and dies by a single question: how much do you let the past speak, and how loudly do you answer back? Ænsemble's approach to this Wilhelminian country house in Brandenburg is a thoughtful responses to that...
On the Edge of the Possible: Bokey Grant Architects’ EA House in Mittagong, NSW.There are houses that solve problems, and then there are houses that re-frame the question. EA House by Bokey Grant Architects, perched on an "unbuildable" cliff-face escarpment in Mittagong, falls squarely in the second camp — a...
A Dual-Key Singapore Apartment Unified Into a Multigenerational Family Home.In Singapore's condominium stock, the dual-key apartment was conceived for landlords — a larger residence and a smaller studio sharing one front door, leased or occupied separately. Ascend Design was asked to reverse the logic. A...
Ciguë Brings Its Material Mastery to Caudalie’s Ambitious New Paris Headquarters.For Ciguë co-founder Guillem Renard, the ambition at Rue Pavée was clear: to make the everyday workplace a space of care. That conviction, shared with Caudalie founders, shaped every decision — from the geothermal heating system to the...
Jungle’s Madrid HQ by Mil Studios Channels the Cool Restraint of 90s New York.The conceptual starting point for Jungle Madrid headquarters by Mil Studios is sharp: the corporate offices and creative studios of 1990s New York, where control and expression existed in constant productive tension. Translated across...
Perth High-Rise Office Reframed as a Gallery for Living Work.A workplace where art does the heavy lifting, and the design knows when to step back. A corporate high-rise tenancy isn't where most people would expect to find a workplace built around an art collection. State of Kin makes the case for...
This Five-storey Office Features a Suspended Conference Capsule, Prototype Workshop and Raised R&D Lab.Designed by Ippolito Fleitz Group, MAX Zone Ningbo pairs a five-storey show office with a sales centre that draws on the elegance of traditional Chinese courtyards. The show office makes a statement from the start—a suspended conference...
Ceramic Tiles, Izakaya Bars & Onsen Energy: Valencia Workspace Transformed Through the Lens of Tokyo.At 21 Sornells Street in Valencia's Ruzafa neighbourhood, Paloma Bau and T.O.T Studio have transformed a former commercial unit into a 170sqm shared workspace. The collaboration developed organically—T.O.T's speculative creative...
Artful Workplaces: Emily Cunnane Transforms Intercom’s Dublin and London Offices.You don’t have to convince us of the fact corporate interiors don't have to be generic. We’ve featured countless interesting examples over the years, and Emily Cunnane's twin projects for Intercom's Dublin and London offices prove this...