Habitus - Issue 36

Neil Perry graces the Nourish issue. Kitchens & bathrooms reign supreme, and the perfect home 35 years in the making.

June – august | 2017 AUD$16.95 | NZ$16.95 | USD$17.95 CDN$18.95 | GBP£9.90 | SGD$11.95

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Nourish

As Design Hunters we’re constantly in pursuit of fresh design ideas. This issue we’ve crossreferenced the latest pieces with those set to be the longest standing.

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DESIGN NEWS Everyone knows that the smallest of details can often make the biggest impact. Let these pieces we’ve painstakingly selected for your perusal, add function as well as flair to your interiors.

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FireBranD the man behind an empire. For the return of In Habitus Veritas, stephen todd interviews a dear friend and former boss. someone he’s known since the 80s and the very first incarnation of rockpool.

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the arcimBoLDo DeFect somehow we’ve created a world in which we design to our detriment. the seemingly simple things in life, fruit and vegetables inclusive, are being ruthlessly culled should they exist outside the accepted standard.

90 1400° in the shaDe Despite it being an ancient method of material production, glass blowing has changed very little since its inception.

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66 The people behind these familiar faces have a home to go to and a story to tell. They help others bring design into their homelife, but how do they help themselves?

40 CLAUDIA DAMICHI Working from home might not be everyone’s cup of tea but Joanne Gambale finds that for Claudia Damichi, who separates her work life from her home life with a dedicated rooftop studio, her bright, bold and colourful art seeps down into her home in the best way possible.

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RYAN FOOTE Hardly one to suggest less is more, the inner-city Melbourne abode of multidisciplinary artist Ryan Foote – the man behind the infamous Diamond Lab dining experience – is surprisingly pared back.

181 JUst aDD Water the world is becomeing one big global city and as a result international spaces and luxurious spas are inspiring residential bathroom design.

Home is where the heart is: here are our pick of projects to Nourish your being and encourage your sense of creativity.

53 KELVIN HO In 2005 Kelvin Ho created the architecture and interior design studio AKIN Creative. In the years since, he’s worked on countless residential projects and commerical collaborations. Holly Cunneen discovers how his diverse portfolio has influenced his biggest project – his own home.

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kitchens Great design is a team effort, get a hold of the architect of your dreams and cook up a kitchen to match.

118 Bathrooms the new age of bathrooms: they should restore our sense of wellness and offer a daily dose of luxury.

135 a LaBoUr oF LoVe Dreams change as easily as plans do. aspirations for the perfect home morphed mulitple times over the years for this family.

148 oF BiBLicaL ProPortions in a rare example of living large in the city, a church conversion provides plenty of space for an architect and her young family.

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159 ParaDise FoUnD as city-centric life continues to encourage compact living and separation from nature, one man – and his family – rebelled.

169 eVerYthinG & nothinG a studio retreat in rural Victoria is everything one moment and nothing the next.

1. lightbox

issue #36 habitusliving.com

Dirty talk

Methven’s dedication to constructing a better shower is realised in their AIO AURAJET twin shower. Coming off years of research, the Aurajet showerhead promises unparalleled, full-bodied water pressure with maximum body contact and all-over warmth. methven.com/au

Suggesting the soft soak of Turkish baths, latest collection from Cool Galah, MOMA, introduces hammam-style towels inspired from Turkey’s long tradition of looming techniques reflecting stonemosaic bathhouses. coolgalah.com.au

The industrial-esque CONCRETE range from Ceasarstone offers the raw touch and textured surface of concrete while remaining easy to clean and never requiring sealing. caesarstone.com.au

An exercise in minimalism, Italian brand Mastella employs organic forms and materials in their VOY bath, a considered expression in the beauty of clean lines and seamless design. abey.com.au

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2 . portrait

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off the

wall

TexT Joanne Gambale | PhoTograPhy alana Dimou

Sydney artist Claudia damiChi is painting the town red, blue, mustard and pink… colours that sing in optical geometrics, responding to people and place with largescale works that inject life into forgotten façades.

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“

t’s funny,” says artist Claudia Damichi with a smile, “the paper I wrote for my masters – I found it the other day – was titled ‘Is Decoration a Bad Word?’ It made me laugh.”

The joke isn’t just the clichéd title but the artist’s subsequent life-long chase of that elusive meeting of decoration and fine art.

Claudia sits crossed legged among the gouache-on-A4 geometric studies that have piled up on her floor, their colours popping like confectionary against her white-painted Redfern studio.

Most of the studies – optical in design and experimental in colour – represent the early stages of her Artwalls, a departure from the acrylic on canvas works she is known to show at the Sophie Gannon gallery in Melbourne.

Large-scale, one-off wall paintings for specific outdoor sites or homes, “they’re a response to architecture, not at odds with it”.

Her latest Artwall is a collaboration with architect Shelley Indyk, whose faded aquaand-purple warehouse in Paddington needed a new ‘skin’. Shelley found in Claudia a shared love of Sol LeWitt and the two of them advanced with creative aplomb to the delight of passers by.

“Once that painting was wrapped around that building you saw it differently,” says Claudia, “you saw the building,” she enthuses.

The idea was initially conceived two years ago, on a night of wine and giggles with an art collector friend who was raucously complaining she’d no more room to hang art.

Within weeks, Claudia was painting the rear exterior of her friend’s 1950s semi in Clovelly, without so much as a consultation.

Visitors saw it and commissions rolled in.

She painted her own studio wall and that of her neighbour’s, actress Claudia Karvan. Soon she was balancing on a seven-metre-high scaffold painting the wall of a lightwell for Lee Stickells, the Head of Architecture at Sydney University. “We were really conscious this was a commission, not a quick bit of decorating,” says Lee of the resulting Artwall.

Claudia couldn’t have foreseen painting from a scaffold as a fine art graduate at the Cité Internationale des Arts in the late 90s, but then her work was always evolving. “After Paris, elements of realism started coming into my work…an imagined real world,” she concedes. She began to question how colour changed or informed these spaces, which it often did via optical illusions, an interest

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The Fire Brand —

Chef Neil Perry feeds millions of Australians each year.

Now he’s at the head of an empire taking the country by storm.

TexT Stephen todd | phoTographY Anthony GeernAert arT direcTor SylviA weimer

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S

ixty-six Hunter at Bligh is the site of a most notable Art Deco building. When the scaffolding came down in 1936, Emile Sodersteen’s 12 storey City Mutual tower was crowned Sydney’s tallest skyscraper. The stoic granite façade, its black marble lobby, Rayner Hoff’s copper bas-relief above the entry riffing off Benzoni’s ‘Flight from Pompei’, everything marked it as a building apart. Today it’s notorious as the headquarters and flagship of the Rockpool Dining Group.

As I clamber up the dozen or so marble stairs the tinkle of cutlery and stemware rolls out on breakers of glamour.

Bevelled scagliola columns, green veined as fine Roquefort, rise to the triple-height ceiling as light filters in through tall, lead trimmed windows. But my destination’s not in there with the fine diners, not this time. This time I’ve been summonsed ten flights up to appear before the admiral of the Rockpool fleet, Neil Perry.

In truth, I’ve known Neil for nigh on 30 years. As a young man trying to save up enough money to move to Paris, I got a job as a waiter at the first Rockpool, on George Street in The Rocks. It was 1989. Lunch was still a tax deduction and the crash of ’87 old news. The stock exchange was ravenous and all those Golden Boys, the young wolves needed somewhere to lunch. At Rockpool the Cristal flowed freely, as did the Château d’Yquem. The mudcrabs were so enormous patrons had to wear bibs to protect their Armani suits, men and women alike. But what was most extraordinary about that first Rockpool was the unabashed extravagance of the interior. A high temple to post-modernism devised by D4 Design’s Stephen

Roberts, Bill MacMahon and Michael Scott-Mitchell, the bespoke up-lights were like silver satellite dishes transmitting diners’ magnificence. The gradated incline of the central ramp was a catwalk upon which the great and good could strut. Michael Hutchence slinked up it with Elle Macpherson, then with Kylie Minogue, then with Helena Christensen. Barry Humphries ambled up there, as did Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Costner and Bill Clinton. Gough Whitlam ascended its heights, to be followed in quick succession by Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard. Everyone, but everyone wanted to be seen at Rockpool.

“It was genuinely exciting to walk in there,” remembers food critic and author Jill Dupleix. “It was so theatrical, so glamorous, there was such a grown-up feeling about it.

It was unlike anything that we’d ever seen in Melbourne or Sydney before. There was this immediate buzz. You actually did have to think seriously about what you were going to wear.”

A few months before our meeting at 66 Hunter, in November 2016 Neil Perry confirmed the merger of his Rockpool Group with Urban Purveyor Group, a publicly traded entity backed by Quadrant Private Equity.

American billionaire Greg Doyle relinquished his shares in Rockpool in the same deal, as Neil and his long-term business partner (and cousin) Trish Richards stepped up to executive positions on the board of directors of the newly christened Rockpool Dining Group. Add in the fact that Neil is also celebrating his 20th anniversary

“I create menus that people enjoy eating.

Some people are really awesome chefs but they don’t really create food that people want to eat.”

— Neil Perry

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The

Arcimboldo defect

Disfigured fruit and vegetables are de rigueur in a mindful kitchen TexT Stephen todd | phoTographY tony AmoS

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3 . on location

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As intended, Nicholas and his team have created a “slow building for slow living�.

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