As the Founder and Director of Studio BHD, Bryce Henderson has navigated his way through his fair share of renovations. With a focus on two examples of his expertise in this area, we sat Bryce down for one of our SCAPE Sessions to uncover where his design story started, how he approaches renovations, and what about the industry makes it all worth it.
Where does your story with design begin?
My journey in design started at a young age. If you look back at my pre-primary and primary school journals, I think for the first three years I wrote that I wanted to be a pet shop owner. I think I was deprived of a Labrador or something from my parents, so I was like, I’ll just be the pet shop owner and then everything will be fine. But if you go past grade three, which is still quite young, I wrote architect.
My dad’s a land surveyor, so I grew up in a household with plans on the table, and an understanding of sites and spaces. He was also particularly interested in property development. We were always dragged as kids to sites. Seeing a project develop from what was 2D plans on a table to something that’s built was really exciting to me.
My mom moved quite a lot for work, so one of our favorite pastimes was always looking at show houses on a Sunday. She had to pull me out of a few houses for speaking too loudly about what I thought didn’t work. I think growing up in that environment led me into architecture quite naturally.
Is there a figure from your early years in the industry that inspired you and that you still look up to now?
An influential person in my growth in design would definitely be Mark Bullivant from SAOTA. I worked under him directly, fresh out of university, and we were part of a smaller team and committee within the greater firm. I really felt like time and energy was pushed onto me in order to grow and substantiate a design field like luxury residential architecture.
What are the initial questions you ask a client when you first begin a project, and how do you stay curious about the project so that the end result is true to what the client wanted originally?
Instead of a particular question with my clients, I enjoy understanding their lifestyle and how they like to live in a space; how architecture and the environment that we are tasked with creating can better their life at the end of the day.
Throughout our process, we stick to a boutique experience and a smaller collection of projects. We’re very lucky to have a various and dynamic range of people that we get to work with and that keeps us intrigued and vulnerable, where the sharing of knowledge and information guides us through to the end.
Can you tell us about some of the design choices you made in your Penthouse A renovation?
Penthouse A was originally quite a pokey, closed-off, dark space, so the biggest challenge was opening it up and maximising the view. In doing so, we also created a harmonious flow for entertaining. When you’re in the kitchen or outside on the terrace, you’re completely connected to your guests no matter where they are.
We managed to extend the terrace out by about 1.5 metres, which gives that cantilevered feeling over the Green Point space. Various elements, like a play on reflective items like mirrors, have enhanced the feeling of width and bands within the space. You constantly feel like your eyes draw into a different environment, a different view. With the one mirror column, for example, we found that as soon as we placed the mirror on it, we saw the Mouille Point lighthouse in it.
You also recently renovated a gorgeous Newlands residence which was your own home. How was this different to how you would approach a client?
When designing my own space, instead of having a client brief, I drew inspiration from the property itself as well as its surroundings. There are a few commercial aspects that you want to bring into the design, especially area-specific things like the number of bedrooms and the size of the rooms and spaces. There’s a risk that you can take when it’s your own space and you don’t have to sell the idea to a client. This risk can either be a really expensive flop or it can be a really amazing feature of the home. I tend to use these projects of my own as design outlets, where I get to experiment and try things that are maybe a bit risky for clients. And if they are successful, I then get to implement them in other spaces.
What was the biggest challenge with the renovation?
The house was built in 1856, so a lot of the time afforded on the project was just trying to maintain the property and bring in its years of bad repair and neglect to a state of place that we could actually renovate. One of the biggest victories of the space was this tension point that we created between the old and the new. A driving factor behind the implementation of the design was that I conceded to designing a viewing box, which is the new section and which enables you to look back onto the heritage home and appreciate its detail and heritage. In doing so, the rawness and simplicity of the contemporary lines of the new box highlight those features.
What’s the most unusual object you have had to incorporate into a design?
Usually in residential architecture we are asked to incorporate family heirloom pieces or quite unique artworks that don’t necessarily gel with the design that we’re doing. These pieces hold special places in our clients’ hearts, so we often try to create unique niches or spaces for them where they can isolate themselves and be the uniqueness that they are.
If you had to choose one aspect of the job that makes it all worth it for you, what would it be?
Seeing a client’s emotion at the end of a project is so special. Most people are tasked with designing a family home or their own space only once in their life. It’s incredibly special that we get to enable those spaces where we foster memories and an environment that they can live happily in.
This article is an extract from our October issue. Read the full issue here.
