Laruche Bar & Supper Club—Commission

Laruche began with an extraordinary brief.

Commissioned for the central stairwell of Laruche Bar & Supper Club in Brisbane, the wallpaper needed to somehow bring together 1920s Berlin, Art Nouveau, Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton and the macabre.

It was an unlikely combination—and that was what made it interesting.

I began pulling apart the references, looking for the shapes, moods and visual qualities that might allow them to coexist. Ornament and organic forms met theatricality, darkness and a touch of the strange.

Gradually, those disparate influences became entwined within a single repeating pattern.

Digitally printed in intense colour onto textured commercial wallpaper, the design covered the stairwell connecting the venue’s two levels. As people moved through the space, they moved through the pattern itself.

What interested me was not smoothing out the contradictions in the brief, but finding a way for them to live together. Beauty could sit beside unease; elegance beside excess; the familiar beside something slightly peculiar.

Laruche became a world of its own—one built from things that perhaps shouldn't belong together, but somehow did.