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Susan Meier shares a post from Workspace Studio on the office of interior designer Antigone Michaelides.

What do you do?

I tell spatial stories. People ask sometimes, what’s your style? And I say that that’s an irrelevant question, and I refuse to answer it. What matters is that I listen, and I get this raw material, this narrative. And because I have certain tools from education and experience, I can translate that into a spatial story, which the person who gave me the narrative can inhabit comfortably.

Tell us about the space where you work.

It’s a double-height space, and upstairs is my son Leo’s loft. We have this very big solid wood surface that is one desk. One part is for Leo, and I have my working corner. Underneath the desk is a collection of materials, like stone or oak samples. All of my samples, all of my files, all of my stuff is in this little corner of the universe.

How would you describe your creative process?

On one side of my space, I keep what is current. At the moment, it’s an Alexander McQueen book and some things that fell off a chandelier. This is the kernel and the start of the process. There’s the start here of something that looks very feminine, very ethereal, very whimsical, but the underlying premise is very structural and rational, just like Alexander McQueen’s.

For commercial work or for museums or for reference, I use sketchbooks, because I need to flip back and forth. For residential projects, for some reason, I don’t want to use my sketchbook. I do it on loose leaf of paper. I don’t know why; this is a mystery to me. I start sketching, and it’s the beginning of an expression; we rise from the floor up, and onto the walls, and now I know where we’re going. The idea of sculpting space from the inside out is beautiful to me.

 

Key points include:

• What helps productivity
• The most important elements of the work environment
• Rituals in the workday

Read the full article, The Design Of Folk Tales, on Workspace-studio.com.