Edward Barber's judging duties

We're really excited that this year's Design Awards jury will include an international judge, Edward Barber, of the London design firm BarberOsgerby. Auckland's Interior Design Guild is bringing him to New Zealand to give two talks on March 11 (we'll post details on how to buy tickets next week), and has generously allowed us to fit the Design Awards judging into his schedule.

Edward and his design partner, Jay Osgerby, studied architecture together at the Royal College of Art in London and established their firm in 1996. Since then, they have experienced a dizzying rise to prominence, with works now included in the collections of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Barber and Osgerby’s acclaimed designs have included chairs, tables, fabric and lamps as well as interiors, including those of fashion designer Stella McCartney’s stores. They have accepted commissions as diverse as designing furniture for a cathedral on England’s south coast and dining chairs for the famed modernist De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. Here's an image of the De La Warr Pavilion chair:

Gareth Williams from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum nicely sums up the BarberOsgerby aesthetic: “I have always admired the seriousness of BarberOsgerby’s designs, which are never about stylistic gimmicks or novelties,” he says. “Their furniture is a continuum with British modernist design of the mid-20th century: calm, often quite discrete, polite, well-made and fit for purpose.”

In 2007, the duo were awarded the title “Royal Designers for Industry”, the highest honour that can be accorded to designers in the UK. Only 200 designers can hold the distinction at one time.

Some other BarberOsgerby designs: The 'Bottle' table.

And the aluminium 'Shell' chair.

And the designers themselves. Jay is on the left, Edward on the right:

You can see more of their work at http://www.barberosgerby.com/. We're looking forward to welcoming Edward to New Zealand.

Entries to our Design Awards closed last night - we received over 80 of them, which is a pleasing response. Last year's winner, Guy Hohmann, created his 'Rhythm' shelf while studying at Unitec. After his Design Awards success, a limited edition of Guy's shelves sold out at Eon, and he picked up a commission from Bombay Sapphire. Here's an image of 'Rhythm' shelf as it appeared in the magazine:

You can see more of Guy's work on his website, http://www.guyhohmann.com/. We'll publish the winner and finalists in this year's Design Awards in our April/May issue, on shelves April 6.

Designing from the inside out

The Arrowtown architect Max Wild, who designed a home that was a finalist in our Home of the Year award in 2007, has another home in our upcoming June issue that was commissioned by Sam Neill for the manager of his Two Paddocks vineyard in Earnscleugh, near Clyde. Here's one of Paul McCredie's photographs of it.


One of the interesting things about Max's architecture is that he strives not to create beautiful objects, but homes that are beautiful to live in. And while the home in the photograph above is not conventionally beautiful, it performs superbly in Earnscleugh's sizzling summers and deathly cold winters. Here's what Max had to say about it in our interview with him earlier today:

In a way [this house] is reverting to what I understood to be the early modernist ideal of a building being discovered by how it plays through the year, of environmental control as aesthetics. We've reached the point where a building’s aesthetic is what it looks like, but that seems less profound than how it makes you feel. When you come in the front door [of this house] it’s quite neat because often it’s such an improvement on the day outside. If it’s cold outside, inside it’s bright and warm. I’m not saying it’s a masterwork of architecture, but that’s the point of it – it’s hopefully a reasonably straightforward, pleasurable response.

You get a clearer idea of what Max is talking about when you see the home's light-filled interior, with its simple materials and generous spaces.

Max says magazines are partly guilty of propagating the idea that the form of a house - how it looks in the landscape - is of greater importance than how it performs or feels to live in. Point taken - we admit to being seduced by plenty of homes that fit this description in the past, and probably will continue to be - but we also believe the best architects are always conscious of the experience of being inside a building, and of the importance of comfort. Hopefully homes like this one by Max will get people thinking about assessing homes for more than just their visual appearance, and lead to a deeper consideration of what a home should be.