Elana Castle
If travel once offered escape, it now also offers perspective. A beautifully resolved hotel room, the sensory pull of time-worn stone and timber, the quiet choreography of light and shadow – authentic experiences like these are subtly recalibrating our expectations about where and how we travel and, in turn, conjuring a sharper sense of how space, light and materials shape everyday life.
“Travel served as a series of pilgrimages for me as an architecture student,” says Robert Davidov of Melbourne practice Davidov Architects, “and it still remains a soulful and informative pursuit.”
Having travelled extensively – including to Morocco, Israel, Egypt, Peru and Italy – Davidov is known for his sketchbooks filled with intricate drawings of ancient ruins and villages. He’s also fascinated by the vernacular, saying, “Enduring materiality and the idea of timelessness have been incredibly influential on my design career.”
Unsurprisingly, Davidov’s practice has become known for a refined, almost monastic aesthetic and attention to the way spaces are carefully sequenced and slowly revealed. “I draw on travel to define how I control views, explore materials and create sensory experiences,” he says. “Most materials are more beautiful the less you touch them, so we tend to use them sparingly, which unleashes their true potency.”
Davidov continues to travel overseas each year, with his current focus on Japan and Mexico. “Examining Tadao Ando’s work in Japan, particularly at Naoshima – how he controls the experience of entering a space – has been very informative in my design thinking,” he says. “Doorways are emblematic of how I design. They mark the genesis of any journey into a home, and we take extraordinary care to make that experience meaningful and multisensory for the client. How it feels, how it looks and its patinas over time are integral to the design”.
For Georgia Ezra, TV personality and director of interior design firm Studio Ezra, travel has migrated from being a source of cultural references in her work to becoming the backbone of her ceramics import business and shop, Tiles of Ezra. Working with artisans in countries like Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, Turkey and Thailand, Ezra uses time-honoured techniques to create sustainable handmade tiles.
“My father is from Calcutta and I gravitate towards places and communities that have a certain authenticity to them,” she says. “Places like India, Mexico and Morocco are very humble in their offerings, yet they embody great depth and value. In a place like Jaipur [in India], I can really delve into the history, examining the finer details like the plasterwork and mouldings, which ultimately inform how I design my joinery and my tile ranges. I am drawn to storytelling, history and culture and these ideas are filtered into my design consciousness and into my interiors.”
For some designers, travel offers a form of escapism. “My ideal destination is one that allows for total immersion,” says Nina Maya of Nina Maya Interiors in Sydney. “I need it to offer something different from my everyday, whether in the form of a respite or as maximalism.”
Maya’s interiors are notoriously sleek and restrained, so her mention of maximalism might be considered curious. But as she explains, it’s become an “alternate form of visual stimulation”.
“I head to Europe every year in their summer, usually to the Amalfi Coast, and Hotel Le Sirenuse remains my favourite hotel in Positano,” she says. “It couldn’t represent a style more different to mine, yet somehow it piques my creativity and pushes me to look at options that sit in direct contrast to my own style. We are working on a project in Puglia and my exposure to this maximalist aesthetic has started to filter into my work.”
For Melbourne interior designer Danielle Brustman, travel became the catalyst for a profound career transformation. “I had an epiphany a few years ago in New York while I was working in set and theatre design,” she says. “I went to investigate the hot spot at the time – Boom Boom Room at the Standard Hotel – and the experience was a complete revelation for me.
“The interior seemed so wild at the time; so dangerous and outrageous relative to the austerity of the ’90s and the early 2000s. There was a playfulness and irreverence that evoked joy. I thought, this is what I want to create for people.”
The experience thrust Brustman almost immediately into the world of interior architecture, a discipline she studied and has since synthesised with exhibition and multisensory experiential design. “It stands to reason that New York remains one of my favourite destinations,” she says. “It is such a hotbed of creativity and diversity in life, art and music. I seem to make most sense there.
“I also love Hotel Costes in Paris because it offers one a completely different version of oneself – it is such a thrill. All travel should offer a different take on reality.”
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