Yellowtrace

A decade is a long time in retail design, where fitouts are routinely stripped and skipped inside five. Akin Atelier has been building Bassike’s physical identity for longer than that—across a run of stores, concession sites and a head office—which makes the new Byron Bay store less a debut than another entry in an unusually long conversation. The design brief started with restraint rather than a blank canvas. Original concrete floors stay. Ceiling services stay exposed.

I visited Mecca Coffee Foley Street expecting a well-resolved small fit-out. I stayed considerably longer than a coffee requires. The Darlinghurst tenancy Matt Woods was handed is 45 square metres of heritage-listed space with low ceilings, restricted natural light and a complex array of exposed services. Almost three years passed between conception and completion. On paper it reads like a list of reasons to look elsewhere.

Most workplaces are built to perform. There’s a client to impress, talent to attract, a brand to broadcast somewhere behind the reception desk. A family office carries none of those obligations, which makes it one of the more revealing briefs in commercial interiors. When nobody is watching, what does a workplace actually want to be? Studio May’s answer, on a floor overlooking East Melbourne’s parklands, sits closer to a private members’ club than an office.

V83 Bali chair by Sander Wassink, presented by Method Inc. An ongoing project, the V-series chairs are based on a shared aluminium joint system, developed by combining materials available in each local context. Janur, debut outdoor lighting collection by Ong Cen Kuang (OCK) Atelier. Photo: Iwan Sastrawan. Table lamp by Alami. Floor lamp by Alami and chair in collaboration with Juno.

Some hotels are designed to be photographed. The Whale has been designed for the slower business of sitting still, and every material decision inside it follows from there. Natural, earthy finishes. The spirit of 1970s Ibiza pulled up against the knowing traces of a coastal motel. A retro pool overlooking Wagonga Inlet, refinished and converted to magnesium with its original shape left intact. A former carpark now thick with palms, frangipani and hibiscus.

In the late nineteenth century, Mumbai’s Lower Parel—part of Girangaon, the old “mill village”—was thick with spinning sheds, chimneys and cotton warehouses, earning the city the nickname Manchester of the East. That industrial memory still sits in the architecture of the district, which makes it an apt new home for Jaipur Rugs, a brand whose own story is rooted in hand weaving.

There’s a short, bright window in Sydney’s building stock—roughly a decade either side of 1960—when the city stopped looking backwards and started behaving like it had somewhere to be. The former Liverpool & London & Globe Building at 62 Pitt Street belongs squarely to it. Spain, Cosh & Stewart were commissioned at the tail end of the 1950s, and the building opened on 15 March 1962.

Andrew McConnell with head chef Allan Eccles. Twenty-five Crossley Street has housed just three businesses in seven decades. It opened in 1954 as Pellegrini’s Tavola Freddo Cantina, run by brothers Leo and Vildo Pellegrini, before passing to Nino Pangrazio and Sisto Malaspina in the 1970s. From 1996 it was Becco, one of the city’s definitive fine diners and the setting for a generation of proposals, deals and long, ruinous lunches.

Perched above Port Phillip Bay on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Mori House is the kind of project that rewards a slow look. Completed in 2023, this off-form concrete residence at Mount Martha marks the first Australian building by Portuguese practice Aires Mateus—a studio whose Lisbon work we’ve long admired—realised on the ground by Melbourne firm MA+Co for Neometro’s Jeff Provan and his wife, Mariko. The house unfolds as a loose cluster of pavilions set out on a roughly cruciform plan.

When Hannes Peer delivered four Milan installations in four different materials for four different brands this year, our editor, Dana Tomić Hughes, called it the most ambitious material-led practice in the city. Aurora is what that appetite looks like when it’s handed a building, a budget and three generations of family history. The hotel has anchored Merano’s tree-lined Passer Promenade for almost sixty years under the Aukenthaler family.