One day an elderly neighbour stopped as he passed the house and said, almost casually: ” you know my grandfather made these”. In that moment, everything shifted. We were no longer looking at a rusty old gate. We were standing in front of a piece of local history. The original fence had been there since...

What I never expected was that making balustrades would take months, beginning with moulds and ending with the casting of 180 pieces. For all the compromises we were forced to make, there was one part of the renovation where we would not give in. The balustrades. The original villa had been damaged beyond simple repair...

When war and global scarcity collided with this renovation, every assumption we had made about supply and cost dissolved overnight. By the time we were deep into the renovation, the world was already unstable. COVID had disrupted supply chains long before we felt the full impact on site. Materials were harder to source. Lead times...

On this project I realised early on that leadership would have to be explicit if anything at all was going to move forward. There is another truth about renovating in Croatia that is harder to talk about, but impossible to ignore. Being a woman in this world is not easy. From the beginning, I had...

What I did not expect that day was how quickly a routine moment on site could turn into a lesson about risk, responsibility and safety. We knew the floor was a risk. The villa had rotten beams and compromised structure in places. Safety measures were in place. Sections were supported. Areas were marked. It was...

My relationship with design and renovation did not begin with a grand plan. It started by accident. I was living in the UK when a set of life circumstances placed me in a house in Surrey. It was not somewhere I would have chosen. A modest terraced property that felt uninspiring and dated. But it...