DESIGN

Growing up in Jerusalem and Vancouver, the artist and architect Omer Arbel spent much of his time building objects from wood and following a curiosity around construction. After graduating from the University of Waterloo’s school of architecture, he co-founded the design studio Bocci in 2005 after making a glass light fixture he named 14. “When I began that project, I had a very limited amount of time and budget,” Arbel says. “It was the constraints that ended up being the most powerful thing about the work.” His original idea for called for a perfectly spherical light, but he only had a half-sphere graphite mould, so he poured heated glass into the hemisphere and placed two together, leaving an eyebrow-shaped rivet between the sides. The 14 became Bocci’s first-ever product. “I built the whole practice around that experience, to encourage those moments of surprise, in which intention was a fluid thing,” says Arbel. Nearly 20 years later, the Vancouver-based Bocci is now partnering with Aesop to reimagine the 14 — this iteration is called the 14p — in a new sepia hue that riffs on Aesop’s signature amber glass bottles. While the original 14 light from Bocci was designed to be suspended from the ceiling, and a wall-mounted iteration came later, this version is made to sit on a table. It’s available for purchase at select Aesop stores, including the brand’s shops in Venice Beach, California, in Toronto’s Yorkville, and in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, where an installation of the lights is currently on view. Approximately $545, aesop.com/r/aesop-and-bocci.

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“This is not your average dentist,” reads the sign outside 105 Crown St in Darlinghurst, Sydney. Behind the glass door, you’ll find a curvaceous coral-coloured desk and shelves adorned with greenery, Mayde tea, and Maison Balzac glassware. Sage Space lives up to its promise—it isn’t your average dentist; in fact, it doesn’t feel like a dentist at all.

“We aim for that ‘wow’ moment where people are intrigued by what they’ve walked into and then immediately feel a sense of calm,” says Sage Space founder, dentist, and design graduate Corbin Barry.

Barry opened the practice in late 2023, with the aim to bring something new to the dental space. After nearly a decade in the industry and leading Annandale Dental, he experienced first-hand the way his patients, and people generally, felt towards dental care, and saw it as an opportunity to change that through design and emphasising the importance of self-care. 

Barry worked with Sydney interior architecture and design firm Strutt Studios to create a flagship space that feels more like a day spa than a typical dentist, fit out with warm timber furnishings, marble bench tops and mosaic tiles.

Guests begin their journey at Sage Space at the brushing station, adorned with a playful mirror (that you can’t help but take a photo in) and basin where you can clean your teeth to your chosen soundtrack before moving to the dental hub, decorated in sculptural artworks.

Every touchpoint is thoughtfully designed to elevate, and personalise, your experience—from the stylish Oscar Wylie frames you’ll wear to lip balm touch-ups and water breaks as needed.

Treatments at Sage Space focus on preventative over intensive procedures. You can book “The Essential Ritual” for routine check-ins, “The Glow” for advanced teeth whitening, “The Align” for an Invisalign journey, and “The Renew” to address jaw pain from clenching and grinding. In addition to dental services, it offers osteopathy and is considering adding acupuncture.

“While the industry is heavily focused on cosmetic dentistry, Sage Space believes true health goes beyond appearances, and our mission is to bring dental care back to a focus on preventative care and well-being,” Barry says.

“As dental care evolves, we aim for Sage to lead in promoting a balanced and health-oriented approach.”

Sage Space is open six days per week:
Mon from 10am–6pm.
Tues to Fri from 8am—6pm.
Sat from 9am—4pm.

sagespace.au

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With a hand-rolled cigarette pinched between his fingers, the architect and designer Roberto Gerosa, 71, is rushing around his house, a cavernous former lumber workshop in Milan’s residential Villapizzone district, pointing out his favorite objects. In the corner that serves as his office, he presents a 13-foot-tall gilded column that was once part of a 19th-century theater set. Against a nearby wall is a wooden bookcase heaving with bolts of vivid fabrics: glossy heirloom brocades, pinstriped cottons and his most recent acquisition, from a tour of markets in Provence, a 19th-century paisley cashmere shawl that he plans to repurpose for a client’s upholstered headboard. In the guest bathroom is a birdcage-shaped metal shower stall of his own design painted Yves Klein blue and crowned with a bouquet of ostrich feathers.

Gerosa moved into the 2,100-square-foot space, which has a basement studio of the same size, in 2020, in search of a place where he could both live and work. “But I didn’t want to make a typical architect’s loft,” he says. “That’s not my style.” Instead, he’s created a warm, irreverent home and atelier that speaks to a lifetime of collecting and curating forgotten objects. The layout of the single-story building — which is open save for the guest suite at the back and the primary bedroom at the front — allows Gerosa to keep his various passions at his fingertips. In the span of a few moments, he might arrange flowers in the kitchen, pull reference books off the shelves in the office, then disappear into the workshop, where he resuscitates vintage furniture.

Over the past several decades, Gerosa has earned a reputation reimagining homes for members of Milan’s bohemian aristocracy. He is often called in once a drafty Venetian palazzo or opulent city pied-à-terre has been tidily renovated and needs an injection of elegance and patina. “When I enter a room, I can see it transform,” says Gerosa. The finished spaces are dramatic and whimsical, filled with custom furniture, abundant greenery and patterned vintage textiles from his vast collection. In a stately apartment in Milan, he hung lace curtains along the walls, topping them with antique framed etchings and festooning the windows with gold-colored taffeta. He left a villa in Sicily mostly spare and whitewashed but accented the foyer with an antique pommel horse and sculptures of donkeys made from woven jute. “I have nothing against modernity,” he says. “It just doesn’t belong to me or my taste.”

Gerosa grew up in Albenga, a seaside village on Italy’s northwestern Mediterranean coast, where his family owned a construction business. “I was born in a building site,” he says. “I was playing in the sand with all the workers.” At 18, he left home to study architecture in Florence, where he met his former wife, the artist Camilla d’Afflitto, who died in 2020, and welcomed two daughters, Alice, now 40 and an academic, and Angelica, now 39 and an illustrator. In the 1990s, Gerosa spent a period in New York, where he made his name designing sculptural lamps. Nearly 40 years later, he still makes lighting in brass, stone, paper and other found materials by hand in his atelier.

Pieces of furniture Gerosa made in the 1990s and 2000s for Milan’s Eclectica Gallery, one of Europe’s first collectible design galleries, are also scattered around the house. He keeps an 11-foot-long midnight blue velvet version of his 2001 Eclectica couch, a mix between a Regency-style sofa and a daybed embroidered with scrolled detailing on the backrest, in the sitting area opposite an ornately carved 19th-century Chinese wedding bed that belonged to his wife. There’s a smaller gold version in the guest room between an antique Indian copper bed and a wall of d’Afflitto’s abstract paintings.

Though the house may seem charmingly chaotic, there’s a method to its madness. “If you have a lumber workshop like this, you can’t transform it into Versailles,” says Gerosa. “To bring out the atmosphere of a space, you have to understand it.” At night, when the dozens of lamps are lit, the home is particularly inviting. He cooks often for friends — sometimes risotto with radicchio, or a Thai-style chicken with ginger — and his dining table, a massive wooden workbench from a weaving mill, is deliberately low and surrounded by armchairs. They’re more comfortable than traditional dining chairs, he insists, so a conversation can last well into the night. “I’m not designing for taste,” he says. “I’m designing for life.”