Habitus Magazine | Issue 3

Ask any architect and they will tell you that great architecture only happens with great clients. Actually, that’s the case with all design, because it is the clients – consumers, buyers, punters, players, call them what you will – who give permission to the designers to be genuinely creative.

This is all about vision. The client has a vision. It may not be clear or articulated. It is probably just a general vision of how they want to live. But where it is most particular is in its passion to live a life of quality – to reject the mediocre in favour of uniqueness, and to have the courage to try something new and different.

This doesn’t have anything to do with following fashion blindly. That is for the herd and for those who would rather have other people think for them. People with a real passion for quality design are looking for houses and products which align with who they are and what matters to them.

Enter the architect stage right; the designer stage left. Prompted by the passion of their clients, they now have permission to play with possibilities, play with place and play with the personalities of the clients who will be their collaborators on the journey.

This is why Habitus gives air time to the people who live in the houses, who furnish them, decorate them, landscape them and generally enjoy them. Our agenda is to tell the stories of all those collaborations which go to make up a life of quality and value. Albert Einstein once remarked: “Do not try to be a successful man. Try to be a man of value.”

We are interested in the values that people invest into their lives and how these find expression in the houses they have designed for them, for all those products which give their lives texture.

More or less any of the stories in this issue of Habitus would illustrate my point. But take Na’s house in Brisbane as an example. Here the architect, in close collaboration with her clients, has not only created an extension which successfully blends old and new, but also manages to embody Thai and Japanese elements which express the origins and history of the family.

Or take the Corinth Street house in Auckland, the Bellemo Cat house in Melbourne, Colin Seah’s own apartment in Singapore’s Little India or the remarkable Code house in Bangkok – all of them are architectural expressions of the way of life of the people who live in them, all of them are furnished and are decorated with art works which tell the story of the people who live there and all become a statement of what is most important to the people who live in them.

Stories lie at the heart of all human experience. Habitus tries to tell some of those stories.

PAUL MCGILLICK | EDITOR