Transcript

I am Ian Gray, one of the founding partners of Craft of Architecture and Mobius Interior Architecture. I’m currently sitting in my loft space next door to our studio, which is based in Woodstock, right in the middle of Cape Town.

It is interesting. When we found the space, we very much chose it because of the architecture. It’s the old Armoury building. We knew it was central, but we didn’t realize how convenient it would be to be right in the middle of the hub of Woodstock. There’s so many of the old fabric houses here. There’s furniture, design shops, kitchen shops, and a lot of artists. And so in terms of us sourcing and trying to put together these projects, it’s been a very central location and made it really easy to operate.

It’s been really good to be entrenched right in the middle of the city. I used to live in the suburbs and obviously I’ve swapped the sound of birds in the mornings for seagulls and taxis. But there’s a definite energy that comes with the city. It’s vibrant.

We really end up working many hours, I think, in our careers. And so to have the flexibility to have the work and live environment has been amazing. You can go from this vibrant studio to going home at lunchtime to have lunch, and also just the convenience of not having to be in the traffic of Cape Town. I think the city’s getting more and more congested. And it hasn’t been a part of my life for a while now, where I’m able to just walk across the balcony and straight into my studio.

Yeah, it’s interesting. You would think that they would be very intertwined in almost the fact that you weren’t able to disconnect from your studio. They’ve got quite a different feel from an interior perspective. I think my house is maybe a little bit more moody. It’s been amazing once you actually transition out the one door and into the other door, it’s almost instant.

I had friends that used to say they love to commute all the way back along the ocean ’cause they could disconnect from where work is. But for me, it seems to happen naturally. Once I close the one door and open the other, I instantly feel like I’m back at home. So yeah, it’s been an easy one for me.

It is interesting because there’s so much sunlight that streams into this loft space. We were really very comfortable using a very dark palette, and so you can see it starts with the black floors. And then one of the key things is because you’re not immersed in nature, you’re very much living in the city as the plants. So if you look around the loft, you know there’s so many different types of plants and they very much form part of what the aesthetic language of the home is.

And then also there were a lot of existing features, like the columns that we sandblasted, the brick wall at the back. We skimmed it with a layer of plaster, but left the original brick walls that were in the original loft, which is part of the biscuit factory. And then really just the aesthetic of the concrete roofs and the steel black windows.

You know, we didn’t replace any of the windows. We got them all serviced, and then just kept that dark color of the windows, but put a layer of fabric in front of them. Sheer curtains so that there would be this layering, and it wasn’t the bright light just coming directly into the apartment.

One of the biggest differences probably between the two spaces is my wife’s input. She’s a photographer and she has an amazing eye for detail and she’s very interested in the art of placement. So she’s constantly rearranging everything within the loft to sort of create these key pieces and these key features within it.

And you can see it everywhere you look. Everything has a specific place. When we moved into the loft, we had to downscale. We were in a large home. And we pretty much sold a lot of what we owned and downscaled. So everything within this space is very carefully considered. There’s not enough space to have a whole lot of clutter, and you can see it everywhere you look, she’s carefully placed almost every piece within the home.

And obviously that’s very different to being in the design studio where there’s 30 odd people working, ’cause it’s very hard to consider where everybody’s going to place something.

The studio is very much a creative hub. When you walk in there, you see architectural models, there’s drawings spread all over the desks, and computers everywhere because, you know, all the designs are created digitally now, so that’s very present. You see all the monitor screens and I’d like to think my home is way more toned down, not so technologically advanced. And just a calmer energy, you know.

Although we do have four children and the house is quite full, it’s generally a much calmer energy. There’s so many people in the studio, so I’d like to think it’s just a calmer place, and maybe a little bit more expressive of my wife and i’s personal taste, versus what you see in the studio, which is a collective thought process between all the directors and the staff that are in there.