I was recently featured in Condé Nast Traveller as part of a piece about London’s makers.

Reading the article, there was one sentence I kept thinking about.

Katie Baron described me as “both aesthetician and technician”.

There was something about those two words that, although true, didn’t feel completely right.

At first, it was aesthetician.

Perhaps part of my reaction was linguistic. In Italian, an estetista works in beauty. An esteta is something quite different. The word has its roots in sensing and perceiving, and carries a broader idea of aesthetics: not simply making things beautiful, but thinking about how things are experienced.

That felt much closer.

I care deeply about how things look, but making something look better isn’t really what I do.

Then there was technician.

There is certainly a lot of that in me. I like understanding how things work. Materials, structures, processes, tolerances. I like solving problems.

But somehow that didn’t quite describe it either.

The more I thought about those two words, the more I realised that what interests me is the space between them.

When someone brings me a project, I’m not simply trying to make the content beautiful, nor am I working out how to manufacture it.

I’m trying to define the relationship between the content, the physical form it will take, the person who will encounter it, and the environment in which it will live.

That requires technical understanding, but also sensitivity, imagination and judgement. Often it means bringing together things that come from completely different disciplines.

An idea from engineering might solve an aesthetic problem. A material might change the direction of the design. An aesthetic decision might create a technical problem that sends the whole thing somewhere unexpected.

After a while, it becomes difficult to say where one ends and the other begins.

And that’s why the sentence didn’t feel complete.

Both words describe something I recognise.

But what I really do seems to happen in between.

Read the full Condé Nast Traveller article.