WORDS Steve Smith PHOTOS Supplied
As the first in its Guest Curation series, Always Welcome invited interior design company HK Studio to reimagine their Cape Town showroom. VISI editor-in-chief Steve Smith sat down with Andrea Kleinloog to find out more about the project.
It’s basically a South African interior design match made in heaven. Take a brand like Always Welcome, whose collective approach showcases SA’s independent designers though their stores in Joburg and Cape Town; add that to interior design experts Andrea Kleinloog and Megan Hesse of HK Studio, who have long been champions of local design – and you can expect some retail design magic.
Working with Always Welcome’s product designers, HK Studio’s curation is all about taking you on a room-by-room journey of southern African design, providing a fresh perspective on and context to the exceptional craftsmanship and design of our local independent furniture, lighting and decor accessories talent. Located in a historic building in the Mother City’s Heritage Square, Always Welcome’s space has been enlivened by Robin Sprong’s wallpaper designs, rich colour combinations and daring contrasts that create a bold, contemporary design aesthetic within a beautifully preserved architectural space.
We had a chat with HK Studio’s co-founder Andrea to find out more about how they tackled the project.
✖ How did the whole project start? What was the brief, and how did you approach it?
“It started with a phone call from Always Welcome’s CEO, Stephen Wilson: ‘I’m thinking of doing this thing. We want you to curate the spaces at our Heritage Square store in Cape Town.’
“We obviously knew the products well, and this was an opportunity to show them differently and shake up people’s perspective. We worked closely with the Always Welcome team, using existing stock and some new pieces, and got to play with elements like wallpaper and art. It was really about re-curating the spaces to how we see things.”
✖ Were you designing these spaces with a potential customer in mind, or did you want to put your own stamp on them?
“It’s a bit of a combo deal. I struggle with too much eccentricity, so our spaces tend to err on the side
of restraint. That’s HK’s natural aesthetic. Having said that, we have become a little more experimental in some of our recent projects. There’s such a nice combination of art, graphics and furniture in the Always Welcome spaces… Let’s call it restrained eccentricity.
“There’s a playfulness in it all – for example, I love seeing artist Paul Senyol’s work that big, blown up as a wallpaper. In a very siloed creative world, where art is art, design is design, furniture is furniture, it’s quite nice to see the lines blur a little. People also tend to get visual paralysis. It’s like when you walk into Woolies, and there’s just so much food that you don’t know where to look. You get that in any cluttered retail space. So we tried to create more focus for potential customers; often, it became a case of removing things to make the spaces look less cluttered.”
✖ You’ve also used some raw materials as decor elements in the spaces you have curated.
“Yes – because we wanted to show the source of the materials used here. So for Houtlander’s Hlabisa bench, for example, I wanted to showcase the woven-grass element. And again, it was just a matter of one phone call. What’s amazing about the local design community is that everyone is so generous.
I called Rowenna Rood from Botanica Flowers, and said, ‘Rowenna, hi, I’m in Cape Town next week – can you do a grass installation on the ceiling of this heritage building for me?’ And she was like, ‘Sure!’
“There’s something magical about being able to show people that something beautiful has been made out of these raw blocks of wood, or this piece of sheet metal, or those bundles of grass. Someone has shown commitment to develop these materials, and we should acknowledge that – acknowledge that they are doing the right thing, that it is good, and that they should keep going.”
✖ We’re witnessing a real golden era of South African design, and it’s great to see an initiative such as Always Welcome showcasing that.
“I totally agree. I think Always Welcome can be the driving force behind this – because the reality is that the industry is made up of bunch of small, independent brands that can’t always afford to market and retail themselves. It’s just not realistic. It’s great to see support behind the smaller, independent furniture designers. I think Always Welcome is taking huge strides towards a more collaborative effort.” hkstudio.co.za | alwayswelcome.store
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