Melbourne Through a Designer's Eyes
Why travel is essential to how I work as an Auckland architecture & interior designer.
Our creative director Kate recently spent a few days in Melbourne. Here's what she saw, where she went, and what she brought home.
Travel has always been part of how we work at SAABA - it's how we stay sharp. Kate shares what stayed with her this trip.
Kate shares what stayed with her this trip.
There's something about walking a different city that sharpens your eye in a way your own neighbourhood never quite can. You notice things. You slow down. You come home and look at your own work differently.
Craft Victoria
Craft Victoria, It's a gallery and maker showcase for Australian craft - ceramics, jewellery, textiles, glass - and the quality of what's on show is genuinely humbling. Each piece carries this sense of total attention. The decisions made at the bench, the hours in the work. As an Auckland architect I spend so much of my time in the abstract - drawings, models, meetings - that being around objects made entirely by hand is a kind of recalibration. It reminds me what crafted objects actually looks like.
District - calibration, not shopping
If you work in design and you're in Melbourne, you go to District. It's a furniture and lighting showroom stocking an international edit - New Works, Normann Copenhagen, Simon James, Resident, Alias - and the whole thing is curated with a really clear point of view.
The Simon James pieces were the ones that stopped me. His Portrait Lounge Chair in particular - there's a Brutalist confidence to it, but it's generous, not cold. It has the quality I'm always chasing in residential architecture: it knows exactly what it is. I stood next to it for a while. That's the thing about good design - you can't really get it from a screen.
State Library Victoria - architecture that dignifies
A must visit. The State Library, and specifically to the La Trobe Reading Room under the dome.
It opened in 1913 and it still stops me in my tracks. Six storeys of light, those original silky oak chairs, the reading desks radiating out beneath the dome. It's one of those rooms that makes you feel like what you're doing matters. That quality - architecture that actually dignifies the people inside it - is what I think about most when I'm designing homes for New Zealand clients. How does this room make you feel? Does it give you something?
NGV
The Westwood | Kawakubo show was on, and it was worth the ticket. Two designers who never made comfortable work - you leave it feeling a little unsettled, which is exactly right.
But the permanent collection is where I spent most of my time. I gave myself no agenda, just wandered. There's something about looking at painting and sculpture with no brief, no client, no deadline in your head that loosens something. You remember what it feels like to just respond to something. That feeling - of being genuinely moved - is what I'm trying to give people when I design a home. It's good to be reminded of it.
Kate Kerr is the creative director of SAABA Architects, an Auckland architecture studio specialising in residential architecture & interiors.