ABOUT

You don’t often get a brief like this:

“We have an indoor/outdoor kitchen that’s seven metres square and above it is a very boring concrete ceiling. Could you design something that would be conversationally exciting?”

They wanted the boat pushed out.

I pondered at length and found myself back at university in the early 70s, reading D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth & Form, with its themes of biological and arguably sacred geometry within plants. The geometry of a sunflower seed head became particularly interesting. The mysteries of Fibonacci mathematics can be a tad strange, but their unending magic made them worth exploring in this ceiling.

It would require a central skylight, one hundred and twenty radiating staves fabricated in birch ply, accurately, securely and robustly suspended from the ceiling. We would then need over five thousand, hand-made, sculpted pebbles in English ash (gleaned from our local woodlands, where ash dieback is running rife, this timber was destined to be made into pellets to feed the DRAX power station and go up in a puff of smoke) which were attached to the staves to reveal the amazing sacred, natural geometry I was after.