Australian Design Review (ADR) teamed up with Tongue & Groove for a panel event asking leading creatives to unravel their material explorations, inspirations and challenges.

‘Master of Materials’ brought together the local architecture and design community on Thursday 11 July for a lively discussion on a topic close to their hearts. Tongue & Groove’s Melbourne showroom on Swan Street, Richmond – which displays the brand’s array of timber oak flooring in sophisticated configurations from floor to ceiling – provided a tactile stage on which to delve into materiality.

Cera Stribley associate Manuela Millan filled in for ailing panellist Nikki Marangos, joining HDR associate interior designer Jessamy Ferguson-Smith, and Studio Edwards co-director Nancy Beka, an alum of ADR’s 30UNDER30, for a conversation moderated by Rebekah Spark from Tongue & Groove. 

“I just got a phone call yesterday and I was like: ‘Sure I’ll talk about materials, it’s my everyday life anyway!’” Millan told the audience.

Bringing clients on ‘the journey’

Spark began the conversation by asking about the temptation to use materials that haven’t been used before and how the panellists convince clients to embrace the unknown.

Beka held up samples of materials from recent Studio Edwards fitouts, including fibre-reinforced plastic (FRP) used in a rooftop, recycled Airstep carpet underlay they fixed to steel partitions in a workplace project with magnets to help with the acoustics, and finally cloth from a damaged sail mast.

“A lot of the time in our studio, we’re looking at materials that might already exist, if we’re not going to innovate something completely from scratch,” Beka said.

“Luckily we have clients that might come to us for that.”

Ferguson-Smith added that clients can quite fairly be hesitant when it comes to new products in new contexts.

“They want you to take them on the design journey and guide them and that’s essentially why they’ve engaged us, to be a little bit more open-minded for them,” she explained.

“I find that with a lot of the clients I deal with right now, particularly in the healthcare industry, it’s very regimented like: ‘These are the materials we’ve used, tried and true. We know they work, we know how to maintain them and clean them.’ 

“But there are new products out on the market. They’re constantly improving materials to be more durable or have better long-term effects in terms of sustainability. We have to have that foresight to go: ‘Can I push this client in a way that’s actually going to better them? Is this really going to bring great value to the project?’”

In Millan’s work servicing the residential sector, she said that equally important to taking clients on the journey was setting your design up to succeed.

“By that I mean as long as you’ve got your concept, your design pillars and why you are selecting materials, shapes or forms, you’re always going to take that into consideration when presenting back to the client, so the client is in with you from the beginning, in the narrative.

“For us, innovation is quite limited because we’re dealing with people’s homes and how they live, and imagine me telling you how to live. It’s almost impossible. But you get the good client that is willing to take the risk.”

Trial and error in natural materials

Over the course of the night, the speakers reflected on some successful and some more challenging material experiments. 

Beka praised Melbourne artist Jessie French for “revolutionising” shop windows with her algae-based decals for Aesop. 

Meanwhile, Millan talked of a circuitous case study at Cera Stribley involving mycelium. After picking up the organic mushroom material from a farm, she recalled how it started to smell “really bad” in the studio. 

“We then had the brilliant idea of actually baking them, so each staff member took a couple home and just baked them,” she laughed. 

“It actually looked really good. It was a panel with acoustic properties in it and it didn’t smell at the end of the day because we cooked it and people just really loved the texture of it.”

No matter what sector you come from or you design in, there will always be a “great desire” for natural products in interior spaces, said Ferguson-Smith.

“The reality is they just make spaces feel so much more warm, inviting and welcoming,” she told the audience.

All in all, Master of Materials was an honest, motivating and, at points, hilarious insight into trial and error in material innovation.

Check out the gallery from the night below:

Photography by SGP Media.