The Edit with Hecker Guthrie

You have such confidence in materiality, colour and how pieces make you feel within a space. How did that sensibility develop, and what continues to inform it?

Paul Hecker: "I think it comes from always being drawn to simple, resolved design that has some level of authenticity. That's led us down the path of Scandinavian design, which in turn was inspired by Japanese aesthetics. You find yourself sitting within these wheelhouses, and then you start to ask, well, why do I actually like this? It's because it's warm, textural, and calm.

It comes back to our approach to sustainability too, and it's the same philosophy that runs through everything we do. Do it once, do it well, do it forever. For us, sustainability is about specifying something once. Something you feel has real longevity."

Stacey Van Harn: "Authenticity is the right word for it. There's a level of quality in something that means it will essentially last forever, and it can work through different aesthetics because that overarching quality runs through it."

We've had the pleasure of working with Hecker Guthrie across both custom and ready-to-specify pieces from the In Good Company collection. How do you navigate that balance within a project?

Paul: "I don't think there's a formula to it. Generally, we try to choose from what already exists. There are so many beautiful products out there, so many breathtaking chairs. I would never try to design a chair. For me, it's not about being completely original every time. It's about the way you edit, the way you put things together. That's where the cleverness lies.

The truth about bespoke is that people talk about it in terms of quality, but the problem with bespoke is that you don't get the chance to prototype. When you look at what already exists and the amount of engineering that's gone into it, you have to ask yourself why you'd try to rethink that. So, we leave bespoke for the things that don't exist."

Stacey: "That's really where the cleverness comes in. It's when a project needs something of a very specific size or needs to perform a very specific function that the client requires. That's when custom earns its place."

“Do it once, do it well, do it forever” is a core principle within your studio. Can you elaborate on what that means in practice, and how it influences the way you approach your projects?

Paul: "It comes down to this idea that we're an industry that is, by its very nature, carbon-intensive. We spend so much of our time demolishing things and pulling them apart. So we'd always like to think that whatever we create, when the time comes for it to go, whoever's doing the pulling apart can repurpose what we've selected, and there's as little waste as possible. That's really the overarching reason behind why we do what we do, and how we do it."

Stacey: "And it's not about fashion. If we renovate a house for you tomorrow, you should still love it in ten years, and we have projects to prove it. Paul still visits one of our earliest residential projects we did fifteen years ago, and it's still breathtaking to walk into. It's the same with a lot of our residential work, and multi-res projects like Garden House."