Greg Hatton - Inspired Habitus Issue 10

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inspired greg hatton — VIC, australia

A long-held love for everything old – and not in the elegant vintage sense either – is the fossil fuel to Greg Hatton’s work. Alice Blackwood meets with this modern-day MacGyver of scrap materials and imperfect results.

Modern-Day MacGyver Text Alice Blackwood

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Photography James Geer and Ben Hosking

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For a man who dislikes the term ‘organic’ – and I’m inclined to agree with him – Greg Hatton is just that. While the overused expression is busy ‘greening’ up our coffee and cotton, creatives like Greg are bringing it back into context.

A stonemason, landscaper, paver, furniture designer, and environmental expert (riparian stream management to be specific!); dirt, trees and rocks are the tools of Greg’s multi-faceted business and everyday trade. His is a craft of raw naturalness and imperfection, inspired by youthful adventures into the Victorian bush, visits to a secret scrap yard and an informed appreciation for the natural environment.

His spindly, pared-back furniture pieces with their distressed surfaces and raw finish have set the hearts of many a homemaker a-flutter. However, while the rest of the world is fawning over his earthy talents, Greg is matterof-fact and rather practical about his work and underlying influences.

Much of his furniture – occasionally nicknamed ‘Sticky’ and other such names – are made from Willow, which is “nothing special”, he says. “Really, it’s just a weed.” Travelling to Newstead (about two hours north-west of Melbourne) in search of this nuisance plant, Greg nonchalantly admits to “chopping it out of the creek”, an act which seems right at home with his aesthetic (and quite responsible in light of a past career in environmental management).

01 Greg divides his time between Melbourne and his property in Newstead, Victoria.

02 Greg’s Deco armchairs have a primitive, paredback aesthetic.

03 A classic Hatton chair, fondly nicknamed Sticky.

04 The old butter-cumcandle-making factory in Newstead, filled with furniture of Greg’s own design, is slowly starting to feel like home.

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05 Previously a butter factory, and then a candle-making factory, Greg describes his Newstead property as the “house of wax”.

06 Greg’s 4-Poster bed is made from Sugar Gum wood.

07 The living room, with its original raw, industrial finishes, houses a coffee table made by Greg out of which plants grow.

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Greg has always been into “old crap” – as he puts it, spending holidays as a child heading off into the bush and national parks, seeking out old homesteads. A bush-dwelling recluse by the name of Uncle Keith has played an unwittingly large role in Greg’s work and aesthetic. “He lived down on his farm like a hermit, and had the best milk carton collection,” says Greg, not to mention a yard full of discarded cars.

“Keith would use these as his resource” – the cars, that is – piecing various auto parts together to make random implements, such as an industrial-sized cement mixer, and a heater that burned the leftover oil and brake fluid from discarded 44-gallon drums.

“It’s that colonial Australian depressionera ingenuity” which draws Greg’s creative eye.

“You see a lot of it in farming communities, people just ‘MacGyver’ things together”. It follows then, that the main philosophy behind his work draws on a similar aesthetic. Greg’s Side Tables feature rings of wire orbiting around the legs; a cheeky Runaway Ham is a chopping block on legs with gurney wheels screwed into the feet; and a Fredrikson Stallard-style Table,

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“You see a lot of it in farming communities, people just ‘MacGyver’ things together.”

– GREG

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inspired greg hatton — VIC, australia well, “he uses packing strap... I’ve gone with an old barrel ring and added castors,” says Greg.

When a friend put Greg onto prolific Dutch furniture maker, Piet Hein Eek, Greg was instantly engaged. “Hein Eek works off a similar principle to me, using scrap materials and also getting imperfect results. He’s got a real northern European aesthetic, and a good balance of materials, using steel, glass and timber in the right ratios.”

While Greg’s practice finds him working on everything from paving to stonemasonry, landscaping gardens to creating commissioned furniture pieces (many from materials his clients “present” to him), Hein Eek “does fit-outs of commercial places, he does the overall job rather than just making furniture components.”

Also, “he’s probably a lot more refined in terms of cabinet making, while mine’s a lot looser.”

And while Hein Eek’s work is “like a lot of inspirations – you glean a bit off it but you don’t want to replicate it”, Greg has happily drawn on it in a few, beautiful instances. “I did a bed which was inspired by some of his work” – there’s the Single Bed constructed from rescued floorboards and an old gate in peeling greens and whites. There’s also a 4-Poster which, as the name suggests, is a raw bed frame of four towering posts, connected at the top by a crosshatch of timber lengths.

Interestingly, Greg discovered Hein Eek while he was working on a project for South Melbourne café and roasting house, St ALi. “The café space was an industrial conversion

08 Greg’s furniture balances raw beauty with natural imperfections.

09 Greg’s Runaway Ham is made from an old cutting block and timber legs afixed with castors.

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“I was trying to convince them that you could maintain the same look while bringing in other elements, and used Hein Eek’s work as an example.”

– GREG

10 Greg admires the work of Piet Hein Eek, much of which is made from scrap wood.

11 Piet Hein Eek’s Waste cabinet, which is made from scrap wood.

12 Greg’s Rescued Chair shares a common raw aesthetic with Piet Hein Eek’s work.

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with lots of bits and pieces, and they wanted to maintain that look,” he says. “I was trying to convince them that you could maintain the same look while bringing in other elements, and used Hein Eek’s work as an example.”

Greg constructed a wall of coffee bean silos from plywood and scrap wood cladding.

Each silo flies a kooky, station master’s flag, to signal the coffee bean levels. “This is a round disk of ply with a pole that comes out the top, and it floats on top of the beans,” says Greg of the low-tech but highly effective feature.

To top it off, Greg designed a hoist and “sort of gangplank” for refilling each of the silos, injecting the café with a just a little bit of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with all the “Oompa Loompas working in an industrious coffee roasting environment while the customers look on”.

Complementing Greg’s furniture-making practice is his landscaping work, which is a celebration of local environment and natural materials. “In the garden, you’ve always got furniture components, a stone wall is built to

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13 Greg, pictured at home, has a sense of humour and an affinity with willow sticks and wood.

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bench height to double as a seat”, and the stones themselves tend to be local rock.

Greg also studied geology and has an innate appreciation for natural cycles. “When the rock breaks down and forms the soil, the minerals in that translate to the nutrients in the soil, which the vegetation grows off.” Hence his landscaped spaces appear to grow almost as naturally as the surrounding environment itself.

And when he’s not in the garden, he’s on the road driving out to his old butter factory in Newstead (a work-in-progress discovered on one of his Willow-hunting ventures). The huge warehouse space has had a number of past lives, most recently housing a candle-making factory.

“I remember taking possession of it,” says Greg.

“And after being in there for a week, I was in the house of wax and chipboard shelving.”

“There’s still a lot of work needed to bring this project up to speed, and I’m trying to keep it as raw as possible – I like the concept of a big room, a bed, and nothing else” – a quintessential Hatton aesthetic.

Greg Hatton, greghatton.com

A day in the life of... greg hatton 7:30 AM I wake up when I wake up, let the body decide, no alarm clocks. I seem to want to get up pretty early anyway. Hot shower to get my body into a state of movement, and coffee at Mart in Albert park, where I scratch my head and wonder what I’m doing today.

9:00 AM Nothing really normal too be honest – no average day for me. I generally start with a rendezvous with Skinny (my sidekick) and maybe Gumby or Benchy (the occasional labour force). I start crossing things off my list, I build this, I gather materials for that, I move something from here to there. The soundtrack is 774 ABC Melbourne or 3RRR on the radio.

1:00 PM For lunch I try to reward my hard labour with some form of café

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treat. Regulars are The Wall, The Bell Jar, Cowderoy and Mart. I work pretty hard physically and often get distracted by the task at hand and sometimes forget to eat, so I try to sit down and poke some tasty nutrients into the system at least once a day.

2:00 PM Back into it. I find a good patch of willow on the side of the road and a fallen pine tree with large open pine cones to fill a mesh box fence I’m making. I cut up my hands collecting the bastards and amuse people stopping at road works.

5:00 PM I arrive at Butterland (the old butter factory). I unload, take Kevin the Wonderdog down the street to get some hundefutter before the shop shuts. Then I lie on the floor for an hour to straighten myself out.

7:30 PM I head down to the Railway Hotel in Newstead, a dangerous 4 doors down from Butterland, for good, country, quality people watching, conversation and cold beer.

11:00 PM A cup of tea, then I crawl into bed and fall asleep in front of an obscure SBS film.

2:30 AM I wake up, turn off the TV and prepare to do it all again tomorrow.

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