Pittella spoke to Hamish Guthrie and Paul Hecker from Melbourne-based studio Hecker Guthrie who reimagined the Pittella headquarters in Melbourne and also collaborate with them on residential projects around the country.
What influences you when you design a space?
The studio believes in working with the client to develop a brief and an overarching concept, which drives a project and becomes a shared journey. Whatever the scale of the project we always start from a big, underpinning idea, which informs materiality, light, comfort, texture and sets up filters early on for everyone involved in the project.
“One mentor from whom I learned to trust my own judgement and whose advice I hold dear to this day, taught me to look at everything, to see the potential in everything, the joy (the lack thereof) and learn to make your own decisions around good and bad and find exciting ways to challenge the norm,” Hecker said.
How do you describe your design ethos?
The aim of the studio is to create spaces that are endearing and beautiful, where the feeling speaks louder than the furnishings and the levels of charm and comfort outweigh the instant gratification of the merely new.
Our muse has always been an idea of authenticity, in all its forms, existing in each of our projects. Design embodies this in the most truthful way, with an honesty that is becoming a rare currency. It’s not so much about creating an aesthetic, but more about conjuring an experience, creating stories and letting a narrative take its own form. In such a unique and unparalleled way, it’s a discovery-through-process, through making, through reacting to materiality in such an intimate way that then has the potential to advance our own stories, and ultimately our experiences with our spaces.
