Interior design: finding fresh beauty in Bauhaus

Given the burgeoning market for innovative new furniture, it's interesting to see an interior design practice trawling the archives and going back to the foundation of modern design, the Bauhaus.

This short-lived, highly charged period of creativity between 1919 and 1933 centred around the Bauhaus design school in the German city of Weimar, where the emphasis was on purity of form. Extraneous decorative flourishes were rejected in favour of the use of materials such as steel, glass, leather and timber, often in untested ways. The aesthetic resonated throughout Europe, defining the work of Le Corbusier, his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand in France and Gerrit Rietveld in the Netherlands.

It is to these particular designers that Sydney practice Amber Road turned in its recent interior fit-out of a 90-square-metre apartment in Bondi. "The brief was to break away from the traditional, predictable, coastal go-to palettes and provide casual yet sophisticated new beginnings for our client," says co-director Yasmine Ghoniem.

The galvanising point for the design direction of the apartment was the purchase of a glass-topped, concrete-based Saporiti dining table. This became a gateway to the rest of the furniture choices, which included the sculptural Rietveld "Zig-Zag" chair (1934, shown on the left) and the Charlotte Perriand "LC7" (1927, right), a swivel chair in chromed steel and leather, both manufactured today by Cassina. "On a practical level they work well within such a small footprint, with the duo of cantilevered "Zig-Zag" chairs sporting a slim-enough frame to accommodate two bums quite comfortably," says Ghoniem.