Category: Craft

The argument for commissioning a piece from a Nicholas Building goldsmith rather than purchasing from a luxury brand rests on something more specific than the usual craft-versus-commercial distinction. It rests on knowledge: the knowledge of Australian geol…

The question of when a well-made object stops being a functional item and becomes something that deserves the same quality of attention as a painting is not a question with a clean answer, but it is the question that Melbourne’s best design stores have been…

The fabric itself is the argument. Not the garment, not the label, not the photography: the fabric, which you can touch before you buy and which will tell you, if you know how to read it, more about the intelligence behind a maker’s practice than any amount…

Melbourne’s best florists have more in common with the city’s architects than with the industry’s decorative mainstream. They think about negative space: the gap between stems, the void that gives a form its integrity, the absence that makes the presence of…

Melbourne did to coffee what Paris did to wine: established a local standard of quality so specific and so well-argued that the rest of Australia eventually had to accept it as the benchmark. The city’s coffee culture — built on the Italian immigrant espres…

Aesop was founded in Melbourne in 1987. This fact has shaped everything about how the city relates to fragrance — not as a luxury good that carries a house’s prestige from Paris or New York, but as a category that rewards the same analytical intelligence yo…

There is a quality of knowledge that Melbourne’s inner-north vintage economy produces in its best practitioners that is not available anywhere else: the ability to recognise, in a rack of garments that has not been curated to flatter the buyer’s taste, an o…

The question of what distinguishes a Melbourne suit is not a question of lapel width or trouser silhouette — those are fashion variables, seasonal and reversible. It is a question of construction, which is the part of a garment that you cannot see but can f…

The argument for letterpress — for hand-setting type in metal and running it through a press, for relief printing with woodblocks and linocuts, for producing an edition that has physical variation across its twenty-five copies because twenty-five individual…

The best Melbourne ceramic is not comfortable. It does not fit into a Japandi-inflected interior without resistance, does not photograph cleanly against a white wall, does not read as a lifestyle accessory. It is irregular where regularity would be easier,…