David Marriner purchased the “World’s Best Jazz Club” Bennetts Lane Jazz Club with a vision to move it to Flinders Lane as a complementary neighbour to his development hosting Chanel (on the corner of Russell street). Chanel has a long history of enjoying, supporting and promoting great jazz music. This project seeks to repair the blind side of the Grand Hyatt which dominates much of the south side of the lane in the area. It will provide access to the new club, house a cafe and salon, support the visual arts, and raise the aesthetics and amenity of the area.

Flipboard Cafe had a short but exciting life on La Trobe Street, Melbourne. Designed by Brollyites Megg Evans and Martin Heide, the cafe enjoyed the theatrics of small spaces and big city life. Shoehorned into the emergency exit of Bennetts Lane Jazz Club and Brolly Studios, the cafe extolled the virtues of opportunity and niche momentary dwelling.

See https://architectureau.com/articles/flipboard-cafe/ by Marcus Baumgart

https://www.archdaily.com/488617/flipboard-cafe-brolly-design

Brolly Studios was designed with a poem in mind - Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning. In a quest to separate origins from aims, the irony that aims always to wander back toward origins can only be revealed after a long and often perilous (artistically and personally) journey. This was the quest for Brolly Studios, in a conceited Promethean move, to design separation in an attempt to bind aims and origins together.

Just as the poem’s hero wanders through lies, deserts, despair, highways, doubt and plains, so too does the visitor to Brolly Studios. The irony opens up to synecdoche (parts that stand in for the whole), which condenses into metaphor and metonymy, cascades into metalepsis and points to conceit.

When you arrive to the space you’re delivered already part way in your journey, a turn, which way?, already committed… You’re in the vast void of the middle. The studios present themselves behind you openly but somehow like a maze, and before you stands a dark tower. It is surrounded at its base by a modest modern wood box, as if washed up upon the shore of a change in flooring. To the left are the amenities, to the right a suprematist cloud, under which is a meeting room and beyond is a kitchen.

The dark tower, not unlike a hermit’s craggy grotto, obfuscates a bed-nest (not a room/an un-room), with a small window cut out of it. A bridge joins the lofty white cube beside it. It stands in for all the poets, philosophers, thinkers and hermits whose thoughts retain the oscillating conundrums of here and there, one and many, either/or, love and despair, art and its shadow, and more. The white room was built for a baby boy (Melmo) who joined the space in 2012.

Between the irony of the ‘samba’ stairs (double height over run by specifying which foot gets to tread) and the ramp (inefficient but fun); the contortions of the open bathroom, the community mill in the kitchen and the many designers, droners, entrepreneurs and makers who cohabited with resident Megg Evans, produced a social/spatial matrix of magic, mayhem and music (with a jazz club below).

Faced with the relentless consumption of insightful information left behind at the end of the day at cafe’s, we wanted to respond to its digestion with humour. Brolly Design presents the Press Stool: where the pages of yesterday support the reading of today, and then some… 

It seems every serious design agency needs to someday tackle the commonwealth of horizontal surfaces for the ass. The more practical innovation of the project lies in its site specific repeatability. Cafes have long provided patrons with access to newspapers, independent broadsheets and street mags, and they’re usually thrown out at the end of the day to be recycled. With the Flipboard Press Stool you can sip coffee and read assured that today’s press will be tomorrows stool (or at least next month’s). The upcycling of the stool that limits the need for more bin space also provides the café use of the stool as a marketing device – gifted to loyal customers, or sold as a piece of interesting time and site-sensitive merchandise.

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” - Albert Einstein 

When owners Harry Tsiaples and Nick Tiktikakis engaged us to design Mjr Tom the brief was simple: “A place that fills from front to back during the day, and vice versa at night.” Thus Mjr Tom is split into two main areas: a cosy front cafe dominated by tables and benches, and a big standing-room bar out back. A tunnel-like passageway connects the two spaces, while downstairs there’s a bluestone-lined basement and a pool table, which can convert to a private dining room.

Bringing the urge to move through the space into our material palate, we used exterior corrigated cladding into the space as a play on inside-outside. With plants and plywood, along with reclaimed timbers and fine details, we managed to blur the lines between interior and exterior providing a seamless experience that moves from exteriority to intimacy rather than to interiority.

See: Australian Design Review here

In addition to our studios we took over this little lost warehouse in the city to be able to build our designs and host events. Vanderlism was gracious enough to paint this fabulous cat-lady on the front and adorn the sides (a nod to Patty and her cats - previous owner), with support from Authority Clothing (a Brolly resident at the time).