Interior designer Nicole Wrensch from Soda Custom spoke to Scape about the forecasts for luxury surfaces, an essential ingredient for design that evokes feeling — that’s capable of moving you. Nicole shared these sentiments after carefully scrutinising the clean, elegant grooves and imperceptible joints on a nearby Fossil slab: a piece from Arkèon, the brand new, designer collection by Infinity Surfaces for high-end spaces.
In your opinion, what makes truly great design?
For me, great design is achieved when you really know who you are. When you create a home or space that reflects you and your personality. It evokes that feeling within you. As an interior designer, I focus a lot on the mood of an environment which includes all the senses – believe it or not, we focus a lot on smell and sound too. You don’t want to walk into a Soda Custom place and be overwhelmed. You want to walk in and not feel overdressed nor underdressed. The overall experience must be relaxed and just feel good.
With any design, where do you begin, and what are your go-to materials?
Floors and walls are great places to start. I really like wood because it’s soft, warm, and inviting. We love working with oak and travertine because they’re soft, a little masculine, but very contemporary and warm at the same time. For the walls, I would choose something more industrial or cold like a tile, marble, or engineered stone. When you mix engineered stone and wood, you don’t get a clinical, cold feeling.
When designing a home, where would you place engineered surfaces?
I would use it in the kitchen. You know things get a little bit messy, and engineered surfaces are amazing because it doesn’t scratch and it’s not porous, so it doesn’t stain like real marble. My favourite stone is the Fossil: the grooves are so beautiful. The floor tile meets the wall tile in large formats where you can barely see a joint, making the space look clean, elegant, and contemporary.
Your projects show such acute attention to finishings. Whatother details are essential for design perfection?
I’m very involved in the finishing process. What’s amazing about Infinity is that you get a 6 mm and a 12 mm. Certain slabs look like marble, but they’re engineered stone. So, if you want a marble floor and marble on the wall, it’s great to match the real marble to the engineered marble. That 6 mm allows you to make everything look integrated. And that’s an incredible design element – when everything looks like it was made for the space.
Which surface trends are standing out in the industry?
Beautiful tiles, that have been honed by hand, are everywhere and used in different ways – even on kitchen counters. People are edging away from the light and the neutral – instead, they’re going for moodier mar- bles that have more soul, that are a little bit darker, and have lots of movement. Darker travertines, viola with a pop of purple or a pop of red.
Colour has been a big part of some of your projects too. I’m thinking about the iconic pink-and-green restaurant, Sonny and Irene, that Soda Custom designed in Seapoint. What was the inspiration for the material choices there?
The concept behind Sonny and Irene was a place for women to take their designer bags to for breakfast. We chose an architectural base of art deco and then we made it a little more contemporary.
“What’s amazing about Infinity is that you get a 6mm and a 12 mm. Certain slabs look like marble, others like natural stone. Either way, if you want to match a wall and floor surface, everything looks integrated.”
Forging the contemporary and classical is also a theme in Infinity’s new collection, Arkèon. We turned to Fabrizio Coppete who opened up about the brand’s new direction that’s very quickly garnering global attraction – from the USA to South Africa to Korea.
What does ‘Arkèon’mean?
‘Arkèon’ is a Greek word meaning ‘the origin of matter and form’. The collection was conceived from a study; a deliberate inquiry into the essence of form and the precise curation of matter. During this show we are presenting three different concepts: Fossil, Plaster, and Sandstone.
A return to the classics! Yet there’s still something different and new about this particular collection.
The collection is a collaboration with a famous designer and architect, Giuseppe Bavuso. Together, we sought to articulate the perfect balance between technical precision and elegance. We really wanted to work with him in order to develop something new – something that was following the trend of luxury surfaces – in our way. As you can see from the booth, we are replicating and creating a very luxury environment where there is a good balance between rich colours and, let’s say, surfaces of plain colours which we are doing with the fossil, sandstone, and plaster. As you are familiar with our brand, Infinity is a company rich in colour. We are moving towards the direction of changing our vision to be more, let’s say, elegant and minimalist rather than to only offer colour.
“My favourite porcelain slab at the Infinity Surfaces stand is the Fossil: the grooves are so beautiful. You can barely see a joint which makes the space look so clean, so elegant, and so contemporary.”
The versatility of the collection speaks to the success Infinity Surfaces has had, don’t you think?
The mission is to be everywhere. That is the mission – to succeed as a floor and wall application, as well as on countertops and feature walls. We are trying with different thicknesses to be in every application – from villas to hotels and resorts. Using this material for façades is a good solution: first of all, these are durable materials that can stay on the façade forever. It does not change colour, which is the problem you have with natural material. Though natural materials are beautiful, you must face the issues that come with it. We are doing many façade projects all over the world from Korea to the US to Italy and… we are doing a great collaboration in South Africa. The brand being in South Africa, it makes us proud.
“The collection was conceived from a deliberate inquiry into the essence of form and the precise curation of matter.”
