Innehållsförteckning för Habitus #38 - Exotic från Habitus

It’s not as straightforward as you might think, the notion of the exotic. Putting pen to paper, or pages to an issue, there are countless different ways in which we could choose to explore the concept through architecture and design. So what do we do? Which path do we go down? Why not explore them all? The opportunity to do just that is one of my favourite things about putting Habitus together each quarter, where we’re able to explore a concept in all its various forms, bringing them together and presenting them in a neat little package for you – our loyal republic of Design Hunters – to take in, digest, re-evaluate and action. To some, exotic could mean moving away from one industry – mid-career – and into another,…

A collection of delicate and intriguing instruments, Tom Dixon’s BUMP collection honours the rituals in the everyday home. The series includes a handmade, double walled glass jug, teapot, glasses and cups in an artistic play on transparency. tomdixon.net Gracing the world’s most luxurious resorts, Apaiser’s baths emit a sense of sanctuary and respite. The freestanding HAVEN bath’s signature, minimal shape draws inspiration from the liquid curves of water to offer an otherworldly space to escape to. apaiser.com Uniting traditional craftsmanship with contemporary technological finesse, the JACARANDA lamp by local design studio, Abalos, is a circular hanging light that riffs on the romance of antique rattan and cane furniture of yore. abalos.com.au Italian brand Zanotta has gained a name for itself pushing boundaries in inventive manufacturing details. Cult has welcomed in…

As part of the recent Sydney Indesign, thinkdzine launched their new showroom fit out which includes stunning examples of the newly acquired Dall’Agnese furniture collection. thinkdzine.com.au; dallagnese.it To preserve the quality and distinct bouquet of wine, it’s important to store wine at the perfect temperature year-round. With electronic regulation to guarantee constant temperatures between 5 and 20 degrees Celsius, Gaggenau’s WINE CLIMATE CABINET allows you to store wine like a pro sommelier even in the smallest of under-bench spaces. Offering space for up to 34 bottles, two independently controlled climate zones makes sure that every drop tastes every bit as good as the next for years to come. gaggenau.com/au Multi-disciplinary studio So Watt’s LOFT collection offers vibrant furniture pieces that encapsulate their playful material applications, adding fun and function to…

“I have always been a bit of a sh*t-stirrer,” says Lindsay. “I got myself into trouble all the time at school, but somehow ended up as a prefect on the Student Representative Council. I’m abrasive, which is a product of my ultra-Scottish protestant upbringing, combined with a southern-Irish Catholic sense of humour that – thankfully – mitigates some of that abrasiveness.” Having grown-up in Belfast Northern Ireland, studied architecture in Scotland, and worked for over a decade with the government in the U.K. during the unforgiving Thatcher years, Lindsay’s design output has always been about far more than basic form and function. His work, both architecturally and academically, is wonderfully disobedient, provocative and purposeful, and not only tells the story of where he’s been – but what he’s learned there,…

Vienna, the summer of 1977, a young man is seated on a dark charcoal velvet couch in an upper room of the Kunsthistorisches Museum staring at Titian’s Nymph and Shepherd painted some 400 years before. He’s been there every day for a week now, mesmerised. Sunlight gently dripping from skylights overhead, he’s absorbed in the oscillations of luminosity as clouds pass over the sun. Outside, across the topiary of the Maria-Theresien Platz, atop the Natural History Museum is a statue of Captain James Cook, erected in 1771 as a symbol of a new age of discovery. Our young man is in Vienna on a very different kind of quest. “The room was breathing, all the information would slide away into the gloom, a dim obscurity. Then the sun would come…

AMY NG A FOCUS ON FLEXIBILITY #172 To best appreciate and explore the exoticism of everyday life, one needs to make a conscious commitment to awareness. “I’m guilty of allowing familiarity to take over in my daily life,” says Amy Ng, “so reminders telling me to stop, look up and to just be can be very useful in reframing everyday experiences. Anything and everything can be exotic if we change our ways of seeing.” ANTHONY GEERNA ERT THE GLOAMING #86 “Design is always an exercise to enjoy presence of mind,” says photographer Anthony Geernaert. “Whether you enjoy designing the way you spend your day or an appreciation of a space that tells you about the designer’s own story.” In capturing Bill Henson’s story, Ant saturated himself in the artist’s work…

Utterly effortless. How else could one describe IN BED, the online retail space created and curated by Pip Vassett? What once started out as a small selection of linen and homewares has now grown tenfold. Inspirational, aspirational, but ultimately achievable. The IN BED aesthetic is an infuriatingly fabulous mélange of laissez-faire and perfectly poised. Yet you can lift it from the site to in-situ in your own home to the same effect. The product styling is simple and unfussy, as is the product offering, and thus easily reimagined in the homes of Design Hunters like you and me. In 2013 when IN BED was first launched, it was speaking to a gap in the market for high-quality, reasonably priced, linen bedding. But equally so it spoke to Pip’s personal sensibilities…

THE BRASS MENAGERIE Ollie Wilcox As I write this, Melbourne designer Oliver Wilcox is walking around Damien Hirst’s extravaganza titled Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable at the Tadao Ando-designed Punta della Dogana art space in Venice. The first Hirst exhibition in 13 years, the gargantuan installation is a fantasy treasure haul from an imaginary shipwreck that has been variously described as “audacious” (The Guardian) and “tawdry and low-rent, tinny and fake” (The Telegraph). I imagine Wilcox, gob-smacked at the sheer wondrousness of the amassed marble, bronze, crystal, jade, malachite and gnarly, cankered coral assembled into mock mythological statuary, part of the lost fortune of former slave Cif Amotan, an anagram for ‘I am fiction’. Magpie eyed, Oliver Wilcox’s Melbourne studio is a cabinet of immense curiosity. Established earlier…

When harangued drivers take the Wellington Street rat-run between Dandenong and St Kilda roads in Melbourne, there are a few choice words on the tips of their tongues, but ‘exotic’ probably isn’t one of them. Yet, if they slowed down for a second, they might notice a house that’s just that. In between the low-rise office buildings, nondescript blocks of flats, and freestanding houses converted to consulting rooms, an extraordinary new house has appeared, six metres wide, five storeys high, the likes of which we’d expect to see in Tokyo or Amsterdam, but not in Melbourne and certainly not on this street. The house was designed by Matt Gibson Architecture + Design in collaboration with their clients, a builder and an interior designer. Having bought and renovated several suburban homes,…

New Zealand rug company Nodi has released the graphic PARLOUR collection designed by Baldwin & Bagnall. The Duo and Plaid rugs clash colours to introduce big, bold shapes into your interior spaces. nodirugs.com Alternative Surfaces provide seamless surfaces for floors, walls and joinery geared towards satisfying versatility. alternativesurfaces.com.au Recasting classic shapes in a decadent palette of thick velour, cotton tassels and a diamond motif, Arro Home’s lastest collection, NEW DAY NEW DAWN, infuses ’70s glamour and modern construction. arrohome.com Caesarstone continues to adapt to the diversity of the modern home with five new surfaces. Cloudburst Concrete emulates the look of poured concrete. FROZEN TERRA (pictured) features natural toned aggregate flecks in an off-white base. Canon Terra is their darkest concrete design to date. Granite-inspired Turbine Grey has rippling dark grey veins.…

Some of Melbourne’s treasures are tucked away down lanes, cul de sacs and arcades. This is certainly the case with jeweller Melanie Katsalidis, director of contemporary jewellery gallery Pieces of Eight. Just off Bourke Street, in Russell Place, it’s almost as difficult to find as her apartment in Fitzroy. Part of a 1930s modernist brick building, once used by electrical contractors, it’s now home to Right Angle Studio at ground level, with Melanie’s apartment accessed from the rear. Although the 100-square-metre warehouse-style home is relatively modest in scale, it’s richly endowed with paintings, objects and artifacts collected over many years. Her own work, unlike her eclectic interior, is geometric and highly refined. “I draw influences from all over the place. You could say my jewellery is quite site-specific as I…

“Je est un autre” (‘I am an other’) wrote 17 year-old Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to his teacher George Izambard, inadvertently echoing Hegel’s assertion that the subjective self, the ‘I’ is constructed. Rimbaud rings truer than ever today, as technology enables us agency all over the globe, identity is fragmented, and I is an Instagram feed. In a post-colonial, post-industrial, post-modern and even post-human era, what’s left of the exotic, the other? Long considered a synonym of ‘primitive’, exotica was the dusky bed pal of capital in the era of imperial expansion. Today, the exotic has entered the lexicon of astrophysics, referring to matter that deviates from the norm – dark matter, negative mass. Quantum otherworldliness. The inaugural National Gallery of Victoria Triennial has no theme, but it has…