CHARTING A COURSE
Emerging design duo Daast have relocated to a creative studio that better ref lects their soaring talent
DEFINE AUSTRALIAN MULTICULTURALISM in the design industry and it would be hard to go past Daast. The interdisciplinary design studio based in Marrickville, Sydney, is a meeting of minds between Alexander Kashin and Andrew Southwood-Jones. The two met while studying architecture at Sydney’s University of Technology and discovered they had a similar approach to design and a fascination for unusual materials and fabrication techniques. Originally from Siberia, Kashin had an economics degree from his home city of Krasnoyarsk. By contrast, Southwood-Jones hails from a city with one third of the population: Canberra. By the second year of their course they decided to start a small business in architectural model-making and, in 2012, moved into a 12-square-metre space that barely accommodated their two desks and a laser cutting machine. With schoolboy humour, they named their fledgling business Kink, more for their own amusement than with any serious concept in mind. “We didn’t think Kink would help form our careers,” says Southwood-Jones, “but it continues to enable us to develop our self-initiated concepts to the sort of level that is usually unaffordable for emerging designers.” Since starting Daast two years ago, the pair have won the 2015 Temple & Webster Emerging Designer Award, been a finalist in the 2015 Vogue Living Alessi Design Prize, and been shortlisted for a number of other notable design awards. Last year they moved into larger premises and added a third member, Dean Wall, to work on production and assembly. The new building — a former embroidery factory in a dead-end street between a railway line and a sprawl of food processing factories and auto workshops — is base to some of Sydney’s most interesting artists: Guy Maestri, Luke Sciberras, Laura Jones, Julian Meagher, sculptor Louis Pratt and photographer Tamara Dean. “It’s a great community of people,” says Southwood-Jones. “We are constantly inspired by what everyone else in the building is doing.” The Daast/Kink studio is an oasis of calm creativity. Near the entrance, a Louis Pratt King Coal sculpture is an instant clue that this is no ordinary design studio. Large paintings by Guy Maestri and Luke Sciberras provide a gallery feel, while floor-to-ceiling industrial white shelving (formerly a garish orange and blue) houses prototypes and experiments. Finished examples of their furniture and lighting casually mingle with pieces by design luminaries: Wanders, Newson and Heatherwick. Kashin and Southwood-Jones have transformed the first floor of the building into something resembling a New York loft, with a small internal courtyard, trailing plants and enormous steel-framed doors. The carefully considered interior conceals a prototyping workshop, fully equipped with laser cutters and routing machines, behind translucent corrugated plastic walls. “We like to test ideas as we go and having all this equipment at our disposal means we can trial things quickly,” says Kashin. “We’re not afraid to try some strange things most makers would be reluctant to do,” Southwood-Jones adds. Daast has shown at the London Design Festival with Design Junction and in Milan with Local Design, and plan a solo exhibition later in 2016 to show six new pieces in the Shrink range, which reinterprets vintage turned timber with shrink-wrapped metal profiles. Kashin is direct about Daast’s refusal to follow trends. “For us, there must always be an interesting idea behind what we are creating. It can be anything: an unusual function, new tactile experience or interesting material application. We believe that the idea behind the design should shine through and dictate the final look. Our only other golden rule is to create pieces that last.”