In case you’ve missed it, we’ve had talented foodie and emerging cookbook author Clem Day aka. Some Things I Like To Cook with us this week, to share four recipes that together, make up one epic celebratory spring feast. And we reckon we’ve saved the best until last!

We started off with Clem’s anchovy roast chicken with salsa verde and lemony aioli followed by two hearty veg dishes. Clem is best known for her knockout, decadent cakes – and this one, a brown butter vanilla cake filled with chocolate ganache and boozy blackberries, and topped with flowers, truly looks as good as it tastes!

A big thanks to Clem for her delicious contributions this week – she’s hosting a virtual spring feast this Saturday and the next, so if you’re keen to get involved and cook along, make sure to tag @thedesignfiles and @somethingsiliketocook in your pics on Insta and we’ll be sure to share them!

The best thing about The Design Files + Laminex Design Awards is that it recognises the detailed and intricate as much as the grand and fantastical. Both skill sets are equally impressive, and equally difficult to master!

The following artisans are specialists in their fields, from glassblowers and porcelain artists to jewellers and weavers. The shortlisted entries of the Handcrafted category in our 2021 Awards are 16 makers that definitely deserve the limelight.

Behind an innocuous shopfront on Johnston Street, Collingwood, artist Camille Laddawan threads coloured glass beads methodically along a wooden loom, to create small patterned tapestries. She’s 18 months into this precise and rhythmic practice, spending her days considering colour, pattern and even her own alphabet in the designs for new pieces.

Camille’s current body of work, her first one, is dedicated to her family. By collecting personal documents spanning three generations from as far and wide as Perth, Thailand, Vietnam, Iran, Nepal, Greece, London and Melbourne, she has enshrined messages and fragments of letters into her colourful beaded artworks.

See inside her beautiful, composed world below (which you might recognise from our feature a few years ago).

Earlier in the week we introduced you to Clem Day, aka Some Things I Like To Cook, who is with us this week to share four recipes that, together, make up an epic spring feast! First up was the recipe for her anchovy roast chicken with salsa verde and lemony aioli, and today Clem shares not one but TWO hearty vegetarian dishes that round out the savoury component of our feast – a charred cabbage in brown butter with toasted hazelnuts, and a spring veg salad with burrata and mustard vinaigrette. YUM.

Stay tuned for the final instalment, and RIDICULOUSLY good looking sweet treat, this Friday!

There was always plenty to love about this Edwardian in Fitzroy North, but the previous interiors were basic, and the garden almost entirely devoid of foliage.

With the architectural expertise of Buck & Simple and garden prowess of Inge Jabra Landscapes, the home now is open and airy, showcasing a design as distinguished as its gorgeous Edwardian facade.

On the very, very, very long list of things that we’re missing right now, sharing a meal with friends is PRETTY high up there. Self-taught cook Clementine Day (of food project Some Things I Like It Cook) knows this all too well.

Last year, Clem self-published (including writing the recipes, styling the tables and taking the photos!) her first cookbook, Coming Together, based entirely around six long lunches she created with six different pals. And while we’ve still got a little longer before we can do that kind of thing again, Clem is joining us this week to share four recipes, created just for us, that together will make up a feast of sorts. Like all of Clem’s food, this recipe series is all about being present, making it nice, marking the passage of time, and celebrating the promise of sunnier times ahead.

This morning we’re starting with Clem’s anchovy roast chicken with salsa verde and lemony aioli, and there are two veg options and a RIDICULOUSLY good looking sweet treat coming later in this series. But for now, over to Clem!

John and Jenny Shaw are lifelong gardeners, and their half acre plot in Woodend is an expression of their lives. Planted without reason or design, it’s a rambling and intuitive space that resists construction. Even defintion. There’s a mannagum tree over 300 years old, beside random plants gifted to John and Jenny by friends. John describes it as a ‘serendipitous’ place, a lived-in garden filled with tokens of the couple’s near 50-year stewardship of the property.

This space of cultivated landscape has seen John and Jenny’s children grow from infants to adults, even hosting one of their weddings decades later. Their son, Ben Shaw, has gone into a career in permaculture – no doubt inspired by a childhood spent soaking up this loving family garden. 

It’s a very special place.

In case it wasn’t obvious, at The Design Files we love architecture, ceramics and studio visits. This story weaves all three into one!

Ceramicist Kati Watson engaged SAHA to design the smallest studio possible at the bottom of her garden. She has lived in the same Bronte house for the last 30 years, and wanted a space that would respect the landscape. A dream creative collaboration!

The result is this beautiful, semi-open studio shelter where Kati can sit and pot with the terrain in full view. The dream!