Joining the esteemed jury for the next iteration of the Interior Design Excellence Awards (IDEA 2026) is Adèle Winteridge, the inspirational founder and leader of Foolscap Studio.

Winteridge has been at the helm of Foolscap for 17 years, overseeing its expansion to three studios – in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. She founded the studio following a three-year stint as course coordinator at the Whitehouse Institute of Design, and a couple of years as an interior designer at Futurespace, largely working on commercial projects for corporate clients like JP Morgan and Macquarie Bank.

Looking back, she says jumping into the deep end and setting up her own practice was fired by a combination of “sheer naivety and pure ambition”.

“I really just wanted, one, to work for myself and, two, to do something different. I also think I was really young. I was 30 and coming out of running a whole department at the Whitehouse Institute and building their curriculum and having a team of staff. I had that behind me, so I thought, ‘This is a piece of cake.’ Naively, and I’m still learning every single day, of course.”

She was also drawn to hospitality and felt there were few studios at the time specialising in that typology. “There was the likes of Hecker Guthrie and March Studio, who were my heroes, but they were the main designers really pushing hospitality design at the time,” she recalls.

Building a strong studio

Today, Foolscap has multiple awards to its name, is regularly featured in design magazines and other publications, and Winteridge is a champion of the Australian A+D industry – a highly respected practitioner, thought leader and frequent jury member on award programs across the country.

And despite that early leap into the unknown, she says she wouldn’t really have had it any other way. “I think the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know,” she says ruefully.

One thing she has learned, however, is the importance of relationships, both internally and externally.

“I know now that managing teams and working with people is hard, but I also know that getting the right team and the right people is the key to success,” she says. “Also the ability to say ‘no’ to clients – I didn’t have that back then. I was a ‘yes, yes, yes’ person.

“But knowing boundaries – and you know that through working on projects and learning from projects – [is important]. And also being not selective with clients. Having the right partnerships with clients is also the key to success. Knowing what is a good fit for you and your organisation and your team is a way to succeed in our industry.”

Pertinent projects

Winteridge says that Foolscap’s recent work has taken a deep dive into the wellness industry, including 1R Australia, the first Melbourne location for the global gym chain, and ODE Dermatology in Fitzroy.

“One of our biggest and most ambitious projects is in Dubai at the moment. We’re working with a developer called KOA and an international architect called Manuel Cervantes.”

Despite sharing a name with an infamous Bond villain brought so memorably to life by Christopher Lee, Scaramanga is a much more wholesome affair. The project is a high-end destination encompassing hospitality, wellness and hotel spaces on a 2.8-hectare site. “We are working on the interiors for the whole resort and are actually mocking up a whole villa at the moment,” Winteridge says, adding that completion is due in 2028.

“The wellness centre is going to be the best in the world. It really is an amazing project,” she says. “We’re just about to start design and documentation for a new wing, which is going to be in the basement like a Turkish hammam space. But also they’re looking at a wellness library, which will be a collection of ancient texts, specifically Arabic texts, that delve into wellness and ways of healing from the past. When you go to the resort you can use and read the books, but you can’t take them out of the resort because some of these texts are pretty phenomenal.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Foolscap has also been working on some more modest retail and hospitality spaces, including a store for Alpha60 in Sydney, a new boutique hotel in Fremantle called Garde and a new café for Allpress in Brisbane.

But back to wellness…

Foolscap is also working with the Commons on a new co-working space in South Melbourne. Winteridge says it’s a project that marks a novel direction for co-working design. “It’s really interesting in that it is integrating co-working and health. They are now building absolutely state-of-the-art gym spaces and wellness spaces and including food and beverage into the co-working offer. That is a real change in Australia.”

A merging of typologies doesn’t faze Winteridge, however, as Foolscap has always believed in the right designer for the right job, no matter where they’re based. “Our studio’s unique in that we pull our resources from all three studios together. Often the Sydney studio is working on a Melbourne project or one in Perth. We share the skills across the studios, so if someone’s really great at one thing, but they’re in Melbourne and the project’s in Perth, we would lean into that resource.”

Jury duty

Winteridge says she’s delighted to join the jury for IDEA 2026. “I have been on a few previously and it comes from a real respect for the design industry here in Australia – for our suppliers, our designers, our builders,” she says. “I truly think that we have some of the best designers in the world. Every time I go to an awards event, or am part of it in some way, I just get blown away. It’s very humbling. Just like teaching or researching or designing, being part of a panel is a complete honour. To be able to zoom out and see the the cross-section of the work across all the typologies over the last year and a path across Australia and beyond, I find it fascinating.”

Acknowledgement is vital, says Winteridge. “I think it’s so important that we celebrate the interior design industry. We have such a strong cohort of designers in Australia. [IDEA] is a place where we can come together and agree that a particular project is the best in its field. Often it’s the best in Australia and globally too. And the awards have an impact on clients and winning more work. They absolutely do.”

When it comes to what she as a judge will be looking for, originality is a key driver, she says. “In my own practice I talk about synergies, but you can see when someone has a really original thought and approach to a project. And likewise innovations,” she explains.

“I’m very interested in sustainability, where the choice of materials can really impact the outcome of design. I’m also very interested in design where you can see they haven’t necessarily had a huge budget, but they’re solving really interesting problems through the use of material or through the use of good design.”

She concludes, “Projects that are socially aware, projects that think about First Nations peoples and are anchored in place and Country. I am also very interested in unique stories being told through design.”

Early bird entries for IDEA 2026 open on 2 March 2026.

A quote in this article was slightly edited on 26 February 2026.