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Inside Story: Kelly Thompson

July 24, 2013, 1:00 pm
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Inside Story: Kelly Thompson

The walls of Kelly Thompson’s apartment are beautifully adorned. Why? Because the Rotorua-born 30-year-old is a prolific illustrator (and sometime photographer) and plenty of her work ends up on display in her Melbourne, Australia, apartment. Thompson’s feminine and delicate designs are created as pieces of art and media. She’s worked for local magazines Fashion Quarterly and Remix, and for clients like CoverGirl and Nintendo. A recent commission saw her reinventing Ms. Destiny, the face of Penguin Books’ romance genre. All of the work takes place in the converted warehouse in Collingwood that Thompson shares with her husband Christian McCabe and Billie the beagle.

“It’s basically just one huge room with a wall of windows and a private bathroom,” says Thompson, who lived in Wellington for 10 years before moving to Melbourne 18 months ago. “We divide the space using wardrobes and bookshelves. My friends call it the jungle because every time they come over I have more plants! It can be a little messy.

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Kitchen maid

August 6, 2013, 1:00 pm
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Kitchen maid

Ingrid Geldof has created more than 2000 kitchens and bathrooms and won 32 design awards in the process. The Christchurch-based designer’s inspired by an eclectic mix of furniture, architecture and technology; her rooms are simplistic, functional and stylish. Urbis spoke to Geldof about her career and the practicalities of the modern kitchen.

Urbis: How did you get into kitchen design?

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Hawke's Bay: Martin Poppelwell

August 12, 2013, 1:00 pm
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Hawke's Bay: Martin Poppelwell

“Exquisitely messy, human and scaled accordingly” is the way Martin Poppelwell describes his art. The potter and painter, known for his grid-like decorations and exposed, work-inprogress aesthetic, returned to Hawke’s Bay in 1998 after years in other parts of New Zealand and overseas. He’d grown up in Hastings, but these days he lives in a 130-year-old cottage in Napier with his wife.

“Auckland is where most of the work is,” says the 44-year-old, who works out of a large, light studio that was built on the property in 2009. “But here it’s just connected enough to maintain contact with dealers and galleries. Sometimes you miss being around the more active spaces, but you can hunker down without getting too wound up about the fiscal side of your art practice.”

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Designing Woman

August 14, 2013, 6:23 pm
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Designing Woman

Designer Sarah Loutit, whose Ponting Fitzgerald-designed Auckland home graces the cover of issue 75 of Urbis, knows how to furnish a room. The 42-year-old mother of three works as a decorator but furnishing her reimagined Remuera bungalow has been her most personal project to date. She shared her (professional) decorating secrets with us.

Urbis: Tell us a bit about your work – what kind of interior design projects do you tend to take on?

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Mr Hospitality

August 15, 2013, 1:00 pm
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Mr Hospitality

You can barely throw a wineglass in Wellington without hitting a café, restaurant or retail space designed by Allistar Cox. Go a bit further afield – Auckland, Melbourne, Tokyo, Dubai – and you’ll find his designs there too. And whether its Courtenay Place’s Ancestral restaurant, Ponsonby’s Golden Dawn or the interiors of coffee giant Mojo’s nationwide cafés, all bear the distinctive sleek and understated Cox style.

Yet the fastest talker in Wellington almost missed his architectural calling. Born in Lower Hutt, Cox twice applied to attend architecture school and twice failed. In the end, he did a four-year design course at Victoria University of Wellington and opened his own eponymous design practice at the height of the 1990s’ recession.

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Hawkes Bay: Rakai Karaitiana and Melaina Newport

August 22, 2013, 1:00 pm
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Hawkes Bay: Rakai Karaitiana and Melaina Newport

It’s 10 years since Rakai Karaitiana and Melaina Newport moved back to their birthplace of Hawke’s Bay. “We had this concept about opening a design store,” says Karaitiana, 40. “We hibernated for a year and then we found a tiny little shop space in Napier. We approached people that we liked and liked their work and they got behind what we were doing. In 10 months we outgrew the space and moved to a new 200m² store.”

These days the married couple (and parents of three children) have an even bigger space in a refurbished warehouse in the Napier suburb of Ahuriri. Their shop, Aroha & Friends, stocks clothing by Zambesi, Nom*D, Karen Walker and other New Zealand designers as well as homewares and fine art by local artists.

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Hawke's Bay: Leanne Culy

September 2, 2013, 1:00 pm
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Hawke's Bay: Leanne Culy

It was a house that lured Leanne Culy to Hawke’s Bay. Eight years ago, while in Napier for a holiday, Culy and her husband Brian saw that the sprawling 150-year-old villa they now own was for sale. Once they’d purchased it, they packed up their two children and the possessions in their Kerikeri home and headed south for good.

Culy now works out of a studio on the ground floor of the Bluff Hill house and has a small shop, named Home Base Collections, in her repurposed garage. The 50-year-old is best known for her painted oars, but the store is stocked with her furniture (pegboard sideboards, hand-cast ceramic lamps and tin hanging lamps), cushions and a range of lovely fabrics in washed-out, soothing colours. (There are rugs and fine art created by other makers too.)  “I love clean and timeless. I don’t like faddish things,” says Culy. “My colours symbolise the simplicity of how we used to live and I want that to come through in the fabrics.”

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Inside Story: Jordan Rondel

September 18, 2013, 1:00 pm
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Inside Story: Jordan Rondel

In our latest Inside Story (Urbis issue #75) we venture inside the Ponsonby home of Jordan Rondel, aka The Caker, a self-taught baker with a penchant for artful and decadent cakes and a successful baking business based in Auckland city.

In 2010, while still at university in Auckland, Rondel started a side project, The Caker blog, where she documented her baking experiments for family and friends. Within just six months, her featured cakes had captured the attention of Karen Walker and other fashion names and Rondel was receiving steady orders from a list of high-profile customers. She was poised to launch into a career in advertising after completing her degree in marketing, but instead chose to pursue her passion for patisserie, setting up a full time business baking cakes and delivering them, where possible, on the back of her custom-made bicycle.

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Hawkes Bay: Andy Coltart

September 25, 2013, 1:00 pm
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Hawkes Bay: Andy Coltart

Andy Coltart has more architectural balls in the air than even he can keep track of. The 63-year-old is in the midst of designing a house in Havelock North and another in the Bay of Islands, is in the early design stages of a new build on Waiheke Island and is considering a project in nearby Te Awanga. Not bad for a one-man-band, “back-door architect” who never really set out to design houses.

Coltart, who is Hawke’s Bay born and bred, was once a farmer but, after he renovated his own home many years ago, the architectural commissions started coming in. His work is known for its vaulted ceilings, batten-and-board walls, handcrafted furniture and relaxed feel. “It’s a modern bent on an old vernacular,” Coltart says. “I think the pearl of New Zealand architecture is the shed. Driving around the countryside is just a thrill for me. You’ve got to have texture and scale with it, of course. Then when you walk through the door, everything works.”

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Paris: Anne-Cécile Comar

October 15, 2013, 12:00 pm
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Paris: Anne-Cécile Comar

She’s no old woman, but Anne-Cécile Comar could erect a house from, and possibly live in, her shoe collection, which features about 20 pairs of Tila March and 40 other pairs of heels, boots and flats.

Thankfully, the well-dressed professional (sample outfit: Prada, Vanessa Bruno, H&M and, of course, March, the popular French accessories brand) has chosen other materials from which to build her portfolio as partner at the architecture firm Atelier du Pont, which she helped launch in 2007 and now has 25 employees.

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Paris: Adeline Jeudy

October 22, 2013, 12:00 pm
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Paris: Adeline Jeudy

As someone with a PhD in art history who spent five years in Cairo, Egypt, specialising in medieval art, 33-year-old Adeline Jeudy knows a thing or two about archaic masterpieces. And yet the Brittany-born gallerist found fulfilment and success in contemporary art, with the 2007 opening of her Galerie LJ. 

The modest, two-floored space concentrates heavily on what other people might call street art. “I don’t claim to be representing street artists,” says Jeudy, “but young contemporary artists. In some of their practices they do stuff in the street but, when they show in the gallery, it’s different.”

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Force of nature

October 28, 2013, 12:00 pm
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Force of nature

Now she and one other staff member spend their working weeks creating hand-printed wallpapers, pillowcases, cushions, prints, scarves and bags that are sold at heavy-hitting design retailers such as Simon James , Backhouse and Corporate Culture . By the end of the year, Emma Hayes will introduce its third collection of moody, sumptuous, hand-drawn prints to the world – growing the export side of the business is near the top of Hayes’ to-do list these days – from a Quay Street studio space in Britomart complete with ocean views and office-mates that work in industrial design and other creative pursuits. Urbis caught up with Hayes there and asked about her burgeoning small business.

Urbis: How did you start in graphic design?

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Friends with benefits

November 6, 2013, 11:00 am
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Friends with benefits

Rickie Dee and James Ridgen spend a lot of time together. They work together five days a week on their hip retail concept Superette. They travel together, hunting for new collections of clothing and homewares to stock in their stores. And, miraculously, the twosome also choose to be together when they’re not working.

“We met when we were 13 and 14 and we still hang out together pretty much every weekend,” says Dee, 32. “We have days when we might yell at each other but we move on quickly. I can only stay mad at him for an hour.”

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Sofia Antonovich and Pierre-Yves Toudic

November 18, 2013, 11:00 am
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Sofia Antonovich and Pierre-Yves Toudic

It all started with a butterfly. “Everyone has grey cars here: very classic and boring. Our idea was to make a butterfly sticker so you could recognize your car,” says Sofia Antonovich. “We wanted to make something fun to add colour and ease the traffic and stress.”

The butterfly notion took flight and led to the launch of a collection of whimsical decals and accessories featuring puppies and birds and flowers known as Les Invasions Ephémères and inspired by Paris and for decorating one’s life within it. They’re created by Antonovich, 33, the very opposite of grey and boring in her ethereal ensembles of wornout denim, fur vests and faux-braid headbands, and her partner of 10 years, Pierre-Yves Toudic, also 33, who manages the business.

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Inside Story: Josh Emett

December 8, 2013, 2:00 pm
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Inside Story: Josh Emett

Josh Emett’s no slacker. Want proof? Here’s just some of what the chef and restaurateur did in the month of November: opened Ostro, a brasserie in Britomart, Auckland; filmed the fifth series of MasterChef, to be seen on New Zealand television in 2014; released his first cookbook, Cut; appeared at Taste of Auckland; spent a few days in the kitchen at Rata, the restaurant he runs with Fleur Caulton in Queenstown; firmed up plans for a second restaurant in Queenstown due to open in December; and released a few new dishes in his Chef Series of meals available in supermarkets.

”MasterChef is like adding a nine-to-five job on top of everything else but it’s only for three months,” explains Emett. “I like that it’s slightly different and completely detached from other things I do, even though it’s about cooking. They are long days but I like the challenge.”

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Tokyo: Astrid Klein & Mark Dytham

December 17, 2013, 11:00 am
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Tokyo: Astrid Klein & Mark Dytham

It’s 25 years since Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham left the Royal College of Art in London and came to Japan. “We came on a scholarship for three months,” explains Klein, 51. “We were bamboozled by the high quality and craftsmanship of the buildings. If you wanted to experiment or go wild, Japan seemed like anything was possible.”

After working for renowned architect Toyo Ito, the pair helped a developer renovate existing buildings before creating Klein Dytham architecture. Now, 15 staff members work in their Minato-ku office on projects, including hotels, chapels, offices and libraries. They’ve designed Sony stores all over the world and Google’s Tokyo office. Daikanyama T-Site, a vast bookshop and one of their most well-known projects, won a Wallpaper* Design Award and a 2012 World Architecture Festival award for best shopping centre.

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Tokyo: Kanako Ogawa

January 8, 2014, 11:00 am
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Tokyo: Kanako Ogawa

Kanako Ogawa became an artist relatively late in life. “Until I was 30, I was an office lady. I drew as a hobby but I didn’t think that I would be able to be an illustrator,” says the 38-year-old. “Then I saw a competition and told myself to try. And in 2008, I won the award.”

That award was the Grand Prix in the Tokyo Illustrators Society’s annual drawing competition. It led to Ogawa giving up her day job to draw full time; now she works creating book covers, writing and illustrating children’s books and working for magazines and commercial clients. She has also had three solo exhibitions of her work in Tokyo.

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Tokyo: Masashi Kawamura

January 14, 2014, 11:00 am
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Tokyo: Masashi Kawamura

Mention Masashi Kawamura to Tokyoites and they’ll tell you he’s a genius. The creative director of PARTY, a ‘creative lab’ that makes digital advertising, music videos and print campaigns, is only 35, but he’s been named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business.

“The idea was to experiment, to innovate the ways we communicate,” says Kawamura of the company he started with four other partners in 2012. “I’m a film director and a programmer at the same time. I have a background in advertising and, as much as I love that, we decided to do it in a more organic style with less people: a better model.”

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A portrait of the artist

January 15, 2014, 11:00 am
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A portrait of the artist

Imogen Tunnicliffe started life as an artist in the studios of Elam School of Fine Arts, where she mixed her own ink to create prints inspired by everything from Andy Warhol’s early drawings to fairy tales. Now, as senior designer at Citta Design, she develops the concepts for the brand’s distinctive seasonal collections of homewares.

After completing her Master of Fine Arts degree, the 38-year-old spent a few years in London and New York. As a printmaker, her work was heavily influenced by whimsical and fantastical subject matter, which often took the form of dark, ‘shadowy’ fairy tales. “My own art is always illustrative and detailed. I tackle quite different subject matters in each body of work, but it always has a story to tell,” says Tunnicliffe.

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Three's company

January 27, 2014, 11:00 am
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Three's company

Architects aren’t just architects any more – at least, not in the case of Anja de Spa (32), Richard Fleming (32) and Jarrod Haberfield (37). The three New Zealanders are the owners of Molecule, a Melbourne-based studio. But that’s not all they do: as part of their practice, they offer interior design services, run an art gallery, have an online store stocked with homewares and furniture, and write a food blog.

“It’s about having things in our work lives we are interested in – architecture and design – but a whole lot of other stuff in the brand and the culture that we selfishly love,” says Haberfield.

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