What I bring to a project is not a signature look. It’s a point of view, and that point of view was a long time in the making.

I always thought my career would be in film, either acting, directing or telling stories. I even went to film school and got a degree in it. I should’ve probably paid attention when the dean of admissions asked me if I wouldn’t prefer production design over directing. I paid him no mind and got my BA in Film and Media Studies anyway. But the dean’s instinct was right. Another kind of storytelling was waiting for me, not in the world of make-believe but in the tangible stories we tell through the spaces we inhabit.

I grew up between worlds. I spent two stretches of my childhood and early adulthood in Paraguay, the first from age eleven, the second returning at twenty, five years each time. South America gave me colour, texture, warmth, a particular way of understanding how spaces are lived in rather than just looked at. When I came back to South Africa I fell down a rabbit hole reading about Constantinople and Byzantium and never really climbed out. The patterns, the geometry, the way light behaves inside a hammam or a riad, the idea that a room can feel like an embrace. I didn’t know then that I was building a visual vocabulary. I just knew I couldn’t stop looking.

The path to Oksijen wasn’t straight. I founded it in 2007, originally as an import business, buying rugs and beautiful things in Turkey and bringing them back. I was in Istanbul regularly, spending time in bazaars and tile workshops and old hans, absorbing a way of thinking about interiors that had nothing to do with trends. When that chapter closed I took on my first design project in 2013, a kitchen for a friend of a friend. That led to another job, and then another.

I’m based in Johannesburg now, with projects across South Africa and Africa, and I’ve recently started sourcing from Morocco, which feels like coming full circle. The Levantine thread that runs through my taste, the grey marble, the handmade tile, the warm plaster, the scent of orange blossom in a courtyard, it started long before I could name it.

I believe in function over form. My obsession with making people’s lives easier, better and more beautiful drives me to create spaces that are deeply personal, tailored to each client rather than to any trend. I’m not interested in spaces that photograph well and date quickly. I’m interested in spaces that feel inevitable, as if they couldn’t have been any other way.

I didn’t study design formally in the way the industry usually expects. I studied by going places, by living inside different cultures long enough for them to get under my skin.