There is a version of this story that starts with a credentials paragraph: when Braise was founded, years of experience, services offered, etc. I'm not writing that version.

The truth is, the idea for Braise began as a journal I started keeping just before I enrolled to study interior design at the beginning of 2024. It was never intended for publication — it was my personal space to analyse, critique, and document the spaces I had been dining out at, with entries filled with pages containing photographs torn from magazines and observations scrawled across the page about lighting, materials, and mood. As I was writing, I noticed that I kept arriving at the same questions: What is it about this restaurant or bar that made me want to write about it? What thinking led to the selection of that particular lighting? What made the atmosphere of the space feel cosy, warm, intimate, and worth returning to? Why does this space work?

The journal became a practice, which became the idea for developing a studio. Getting here wasn't a straight line either — it involved leaving a stable career in management consulting, a deliberate decision to retrain, and a growing conviction that the work I actually wanted to do existed at the intersection of psychology, history, business, and the built environment.

Braise is my experiment of what happens when those things are allowed to combine.

And Unearthed documents that experiment, because the thinking behind a space matters as much as the outcome. A space designed by genuinely listening to its origins — its bones, its history, the cultural context it sits within — is one of one. It cannot be replicated. Generic fit-outs can be copied; a space that belongs somewhere specific to its context cannot. That specificity is not just an aesthetic point of difference either. When you look at some of the most successful hospitality venues, it is arguably an economic one as well.

Unearthed is a working journal and a live portfolio — a platform to write about independent projects, study the design of commercial and hospitality spaces, and ultimately explore questions relating to interior design that don't yet have clean answers. Published here and distributed via Substack, documenting the process and the work behind-the-scenes, not just the end result.

Braise's first project is Oakleigh, an interwar, heritage cottage in the Southern Highlands of NSW and a family home that had been passed down through the generations. The renovation is currently underway, with decisions being made and remade. The thinking is happening now — not retrospectively, not once it's finished and safe to show.

As a designer, that's the point I want to make — that the process of designing and creating is not just a behind-the-scenes detail. It is the work itself, and it's happening as we speak.