There are elements of Bec Dowie’s northern New Zealand home that are impossible to capture in photographs alone. One may not realize, for instance, the scope of its rural surroundings. It may be hard to detect the relative quiet in comparison to the city where the designer, her husband, and daughter previously made their home. And it most certainly may be difficult to grasp that, despite a noticeable lack of embellishment, it’s a multifaceted — and completely modifiable — space that belies its minimal appearance. To put it plainly: Its walls move. “The bedrooms in our home are on movable pods,” says Dowie, who is half of the furniture and lighting design studio Douglas and Bec. “That way, our space can go from home to studio easily.” With a workshop a kilometer away, Dowie needed a house that could meet multiple personal and professional requirements. Once a barn, the building she and her family now call home was converted accordingly.
It’s appropriate that Dowie’s home epitomizes a seamless blend of work and living space — Douglas and Bec, after all, is a family business. Launched in 2006, the studio is a collaboration between Dowie, a designer with a fine arts background, and her father, furniture designer Douglas Snelling. “We decided we would start designing and making things, but we didn’t know what direction we would take. With my art background and his practical skills, however, we went into woodwork first. It all grew from there.”
Today, Douglas and Bec is a business with global reach, well-known for goods that marry outstanding materials with clean design and meticulous craftsmanship. And while the company has showrooms in Auckland and Melbourne, there’s likely no more attractive display of its wares than the Dowie home we’re featuring here today, furnished almost entirely with pieces of the family’s making.
Expanding beyond a twosome, the Douglas and Bec team has grown to include three full-time workers at Snelling’s workshop, and Dowie’s husband, Paul. “My husband and I run the production, marketing, and financial side of things,” Dowie explains. “As far as design goes, I’m the ideas person and my father is the maker. He loves building things that are strong and structural and functional, whereas I bring a softening aesthetic to our pieces.”
While business has expanded, the work dynamic at Douglas and Bec remains much the same as it’s ever been. “We’re still very small,” Dowie says. “We’re hands-on, we’re always making something. People ask, ‘What’s your next collection?’ And there is no next collection—we’re always rolling, all the time.”
“About two years ago, my husband and I left Auckland and moved 45 minutes south of the city,” says Dowie. “We moved into a one-bedroom cottage before converting the barn we used as our workshop into the house you see now.”
“During that process,” she continues, “we lived with very little for a long time, and the experience moving from a big house to a tiny cottage really ended up informing the design of our home. We had a lovely education that we didn’t need a lot. So when we built the house, everything was very simple. The design shows a lot of restraint.”
Dowie’s kitchen houses the essentials and little else. “This room is comprised of two cupboards and an island,” she says. “We don’t need any bells or whistles.”
“We poured our kitchen bench tops ourselves,” says Dowie. “They’re made of concrete. We chose stones to go in them, then hand-ground them back to reveal what was underneath. They’re one of my favorite parts of the house.” As for the cutting boards: “The octagon is our design; the other is just one I love,” she continues. “We do a lot of our own cooking and growing. They get a lot of use.”
In addition to their own products, the Douglas and Bec stores stock a selection of accessories and home goods from fellow creatives including Fort Standard, Fredericks & Mae, Dusen Dusen Home, and Good Thing. “We don’t sell many other brands, but the ones we do carry are on a long-term basis. These pieces are by Kat and Roger, American ceramicists from California. I love the materiality of them, and the speckled clay.”
Meals are eaten at a Douglas and Bec dining table. The chairs are a new design, made of leather and solid American oak, and named for Dowie’s initials. “I particularly love the straight back,” she says. “It’s clean, simple, non-fussy.”
Assorted Douglas and Bec pieces, big and small, are strewn space-wide. “I try and keep myself quite isolated as far as looking at too much other work globally,” Dowie says. “Otherwise, I find that my work becomes too informed by what’s on trend. That isolation helps keep our aesthetic very consistent.”
Suspended left of the stove is a Japanese hand broom, a functional piece of art.
Furnished with hand-built bunk beds, Dowie’s daughter’s blush-colored bedroom is soothing and sophisticated. (Although, Dowie says, “She complains it’s not pink enough.”)
A riff on Douglas and Bec’s much-loved Dressing Table, the Floor Mirror is at once spare and seductive. It also showcases one of Dowie’s favorite shapes, the arc. “My mother had a mirror like this,” she says. “I remember watching her dress and thinking how glamorous it all was—this is an homage to that.”
A diverse assemblage of seating neighbors a slender table Bec made herself. “That’s not a piece that’s in any of our collections. I just happened to have a marble top, and decided to make a base for it. There are lots of things in this house that are the product of experiments.”
Dowie is a collector of Martino Gamper’s Arnold Circus Stools. “I’ve got quite a few of these in my house,” she says. “They’re so versatile and fun. I’ve got them scattered all over the place. I had my Christmas tree on one this year.”
Between the sofas stand two tables from Douglas and Bec’s Line Collection, inspired by sculptor Alexander Calder. “I love the optical illusion that the reflective surface creates. Sometimes you don’t know which way the legs are positioned. It’s quite playful.”
Standing in contrast to a patterned duvet cover by Dusen Dusen, Douglas and Bec’s curved Bed Head exudes quiet elegance.“Our entire Bedroom collection is very simple,” Dowie says. “It’s also a reflection of how that room should feel—and that’s lovely and calm.”
Sheer linen drapes add to the home’s movable, transformative appeal. “In the evenings, we close them all up and the space around the dining table becomes very intimate. It’s lovely in winter,” says Dowie. “Then, when we need to, we can open everything up again. Paul and I always dreamed of living in a warehouse or loft apartment, and this is our version of that. It’s our ground floor loft—in New Zealand, in a barn.”
Though she’s learned to live with little more than the necessities, the designer makes an exception for one prized collection. “Books are the one thing I can’t get rid of, and the one thing that I allow to stay out,” she says. “Everything else gets put away. I’ve carried them with me for many years. I have to keep them even though their spines have been ripped out.”
Camel-colored sofas—future Douglas and Bec pieces currently in development—make graceful additions to the sitting area. “Sometimes you design things out of necessity,” Dowie says. “We’d never made a sofa before, and when we moved into this space, I was determined to try. These were made with an oak frame and a beautiful linen. It’s been good to live with them—I know exactly what to do now to make them more comfortable and refined. They’re evolving.”
Among Douglas and Bec’s trademarks: top-quality materials; skilled craftsmanship; and a marked disinterest in trends. “Everything has got to have a timeless quality. We’re about reduction rather than addition. We’re reducing things down to their bare minimums.” Dowie continues, “We’re very passionate about using local artisans, too. For example, with one of our new lights, every part was made in New Zealand. It feels great to send something like that around the world.”
“My father and I have done lighting since the beginning,” Dowie remarks. “I’ve always had a fascination with making things light up. I can’t quite pinpoint the exact reason. It’s just one of those things: a magpie likes shiny things; I like lighting.”
Beside the bathtub sits a prototype of Douglas and Bec’s Folding Stool.
Wooden shelves hold an elegant miscellany of office materials, as well as a gleaming line-up of hand-blown glass—remnants of an experiment past.
Asked what role the surrounding environment has played in her work, Dowie hesitates. “You can’t help but be influenced by living in New Zealand,” she says. “However, I know of designers here who are much more informed by the sea and that sort of thing, and I find I’m more influenced by people who lived before me. My grandparents, for example. They moved to New Zealand from Britain and they brought beautiful antique furniture with them. I take a lot of inspiration from things like that—from the past, from history. I love the idea of reinvention.”
From birth, Daniel Heer was groomed to take over his family's leather- and mattress-making business. He learned the necessary skills early on, honing them through an adolescence spent at the Heer workshop in Lucerne, Switzerland, watching his father and grandfather work. His post-secondary education focused on one thing and one thing only: how to ply his trade. And then when he moved to Berlin at age 20, he left it all behind.
Brian Eno is playing, green tea is brewing, and there are half-finished projects and prototypes stacked up ’round the place. I could be in any East London live-work space. But as I talk more to my hosts — Marc Bell and Robin Grasby of the emerging London design firm International — I realize there’s something simple that sets these two Northumbria grads apart from the thousands of hip creatives populating this corner of the city. They started the studio a year or so back, with the intention of doing something a little out of fashion in the design world: “Our approach is quite commercial,” admits Grasby. “We are looking to create a mass-produced product.” Yes, he’s used the c-word — and it wasn’t crafted. By opting for production, rather than taking advantage of London’s buoyant collectors’ market, the two are aware they’re taking a tougher route. Bell puts it plainly: “Rather than shapes we enjoy making or colors we like, our designs really are function-led.” Their work always seems to boil down to intended use, and at this stage they aren’t interested in seeing their pieces in galleries. But while there have only been a handful of designs released to date, International have been getting the right kind of attention.
It’s possible you’ve spent hours foraging flea markets, wondering how a Russel Wright pitcher or an Eames shell chair or a Jens Risom credenza might fit into your home décor. But did you ever stop to wonder how those pieces may have figured into the homes of their own makers? Leslie Williamson, a San Francisco–based photographer, did — and the result is Handcrafted Modern, a new book that offers an intimate glimpse inside the houses of 14 of America’s most beloved mid-century designers.
