The way they hold us, shape our moods, and open pathways to connection. There’s something deeply moving in the way light spills across a surface, how form and material can speak without words, inviting us to feel, to remember, and to belong.
I believe in design as a shared journey.
One that unfolds through trust, dialogue, and mutual respect. I’m curious about the unseen layers that give life to a place: the memories it invites, the relationships it nurtures, the grounding it offers in a shifting world.
My hope is to create spaces that feel deeply human, - attuned to presence, open to story, and alive with meaning.
Even without adding or removing anything, traces remain.
They hold a quiet record of what has passed.
It’s a kind of memory that design can reveal rather than erase.
Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to work with less.
The thought first came when I was reading Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.
Buckminster Fuller wrote the introduction, and one line stayed with me:
“doing more with less.”
It didn’t give me an answer, but it opened a place to think from,
a way of looking at materials not only for what they can become
but for the time already held in their surfaces.
And when I return to my own work,
that phrase shifts how I see things.
It makes me wonder what design can hold,
not just in what is built but in what becomes visible when things are gone.
Designing a space might also be shaping how someone pays attention.
Materials fade.
Spaces get renewed.
But the experiences held inside them remain in a different way.
I brought it with me sixteen years ago when I moved to Wellington.
It had been tucked away at the very back of a drawer.
When I opened the screen, the keyboard cought my eye.
The letters were worn, the surface faded.
I pressed one key without thinking.
I really used this, didn’t I.
My mother bought it in Japan and brought it to me in London, more than twenty years ago now.
I can almost feel the desk and chair from that time.
I must have written so many assignments on it. Did I still use it after I started working?
I’m not sure anymore.
With a move to Melbourne ahead, I’ve finally begun sorting through things I’d avoided for years.
I tried turning it on, but it wouldn’t start.
Maybe this is goodbye.
To the student days when it stayed by my side, and to the years it waited there in the dark.
Thank you.
There are countless images and impressions around us, and I often find myself overlooking the stories that exist behind them.
That’s why discovery feels so powerful.
Last night I went to a lecture by France Kéré. What a privilege.
He shared his retrospective work and life story, tracing how his architectural journey began.
His work is a direct response to place and people: what we have, how we connect, why we do it. These fundamentals came through his lived experiences of making, and the result was profoundly tangible.
Everything he said carried a rare authenticity, illuminated by the light in his eyes.
They’ve always been my favourite. Waiting almost at the farthest corner of the grounds, as if saving their presence for the very end, a kind of highlight up on the hill.
Their patterns stop me every time.
There is something mesmerising about the way their long necks rise into the winter sky, those gentle, earthy glowing softly against the pale cold sky.