Home Archive: A Furniture Designer’s Mid-Century Property in Warrandyte

Can you tell us a bit about your background and what you do? How did you get into the furniture restoration and design space?

After I became a parent, I was home more. Restless, looking for something to do with my hands, I started picking up old furniture off the street; pieces with good bones, left for dead. I didn't know what I was doing, I had no formal training, just a lot of curiosity and a bit of time on my hands. I learned by watching what time had already done: how structures wear, how fabric fades, what breaks down, and what doesn't. Over time, fixing furniture turned into designing it—I started to design pieces with that same soul, but modern iterations designed for today, with longevity and sustainability in mind.

Tell us a little bit about your home. How does its design shape the way you live?

It's a late mid-century Alistair Knox home, folded into a hillside in Warrandyte, about 30 minutes from Melbourne. Built from raw and recycled materials, it's surrounded by bush and layered in earthy textures. The floorplan's loose and generous, you can tell it's been designed to shift with the seasons—and it really does. We share the land with friends in an adjacent dwelling. In summer, it feels the most communal: doors wide open, music always playing, and everyone making the most of where we are. There's a lot of shared cooking, gardening, slow afternoons by the pool, or coming back from the river with a few extras and throwing together a last-minute dinner party. Dusk is especially good: views over the city, golden light spilling across the hills and into the house. We usually end up out the front watching it all unfold. In winter, everything draws in—the energy shifts, the whole place slows down and we spend a lot more time hibernating by the fire.

Do you have a signature style that you bring to a home?

Our home is a big mix of pieces I've made, art and objects by friends, plenty of my son's cute creations and there's a good accumulation of stuff I've found while deep in the marketplace spiral. If there's any consistent thread, it's that everything is always evolving and nothing stays the same for long. Things that have lived a life before landing in mine tend to be my favourite and are hardest to part ways with.

What is your favourite space in the house and why?

It's hard to pick just one, but the kitchen probably gets the most love (or lingering) from us. It's where the best conversations happen—the quiet morning coffee or late nights with friends, sitting up on the bench untangling our thoughts and ideas. There's something unspoken and generous about the kitchen, especially 'the pass' where we tend to congregate as a household and share most of the tender, joyful, messy, delicious, ordinary moments.

Do you have a favourite piece of furniture or decor? What makes it special?

One of my favourite pieces is a small teak cabinet in the bedroom that hides a little TV inside it. I found it at Smith Street Bazaar; no maker's mark, but it's beautifully considered. It sits on tall, tapered legs and has two large circular glass cut-outs on the doors that give it real intrigue. It's elegant and interesting, and I'll never let it go.

How did working in furniture and home styling inform your designs for Monde? What was important to you when creating the Monde lounge settings?

Monde came out of a bit of frustration, to be honest. I was tired of watching furniture end up on the street, discarded because it couldn't keep up with people's lives or because it wasn't built to last in the first place. Most of what's made today is designed for now without considering what's next.

I believe pretty simple oversight is the cause of many of our global landfill problems: end-of-life in design is too often ignored, both by makers and consumers. It's not often that we think about what will happen to our things when we're inevitably done with them but it's something we should be considering every time we buy something!

I set out to design a sofa that lasts, adapts, and can be fully recycled—so when its time is up, it doesn't end up in landfill, but loops back into the system. That's how the Monde Modular came to life. It's designed and made here in Melbourne; keeping production local has not only helped minimise our footprint, but it also lets me stay close to the process. We are now capturing manufacturing waste and the byproducts from our production and working on turning that waste into new pieces.

In your opinion, what makes a house a home?

A home comes alive because of its people, not just its design or objects. I have always loved order and minimal aesthetics: everything in its place. But lately, I've been letting go, realising how much life gets constrained by that, and letting the house loosen its shoulders. A few crumbs, a messy stack of books, the bed left as we woke up, and it feels more like home than ever.