Sara Aniston

Sara co-founded the studio with a conviction that has not changed since: a room should be built from a small number of materials used well, and almost every scheme that disappoints has too many things in it.

Concept and material

She leads the concept stage on residential work, which means she is the one who decides what a project is about before anyone draws a cabinet. The material palette follows from that decision rather than preceding it.

• A concept stated in a sentence, not a mood board
• Four to six materials per project, carried through every room
• Samples handled at full size, in the actual room, in the actual light
• A written rationale for each choice, including how it will age

Aging as a design criterion

Sara specifies for year ten rather than day one. Unlacquered brass, honed stone, solid timber and natural fiber all look worse in a photograph taken on handover day and better in one taken five years later, which she considers the correct trade.

I want a client to run their hand along a counter in a decade and find it has a history. Materials that cannot take a mark are materials that cannot take a life.

She runs the studio’s sample library personally and has a standing rule that nothing enters it without a wear test: a scratch, a spill, a week in direct sun. Roughly a third of what arrives never makes it onto a shelf.

Sara spent two years in Kyoto early in her career and traces most of her thinking about restraint to that period.