Christopher Boots

ECLIPSES

Sixteen days after the Moon cast its shadow across Earth in a total solar eclipse, Earth responds.

Tonight, its shadow passes across the full Moon in a near-total lunar eclipse, leaving only a sliver illuminated.

Best viewed across the Americas, with parts of Europe and Africa catching it too. Unfortunately, out of sight on our home soil.

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Image: Partial eclipse of the Beaver Moon over New Orleans, NASA/Michael DeMocker, 2021.

THE POEM

Staircases are moments of transition: between levels, perspectives and light. The character of a home reveals itself through them in sequence. Perhaps that’s what Louis Kahn meant when he called the stair “the poem of a house.”

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Image 1: Smac Studio, captured by Anson Smart. Featuring NEPENTHES.
Image 2: Flack Studio_, captured by Anson Smart. Featuring PHASMIDA.
Image 3: Greg Natale. Featuring a custom BCAA x PETRA.
Image 4: Maek Residences, captured by traianos. Featuring NEPENTHES.
Image 5: Greg Natale, captured by Anson Smart. Featuring BCAA.
Image 6: Armel Soyer. Featuring ORP CRYSTAL.
Image 7: Alexandra Kidd, captured by Alicia Taylor. Featuring NEPENTHES.
Image 8: Studio Del Castillo, captured by Damien Kook. Featuring STALACTITE and SUGAR BOMB.
Image 9: Alexandra Kidd, captured by Alicia Taylor. Featuring NEPENTHES.

IN PRIVATE

Away from the public rooms of the home, bathrooms are spaces of personal retreat. Places for the small rituals that begin and end a day: bathing, tending, reflection. Literal and otherwise.

In these private moments, the materials, textures, light are experienced intimately too.

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Image 1: Smac Studio, captured by Anson Smart. Featuring PETRA.
Image 2: Greg Natale, captured by Anson Smart. Featuring NEPENTHES.
Image 3: Lloyd Hartley Architects, captured by David Straight. Featuring SUGAR BOMB.
Image 4: Simone Haag, captured by Lillie Thompson. Featuring PETRA.
Image 5: Armel Soyer, captured by Gilles Pernet. Featuring SUGAR BOMB.
Image 6: Kate Challis Interiors, captured by Sharyn Cairns. Featuring PETRA.
Image 7: Temple Farmhouse, captured by jessicaaleece. Featuring OURANOS.
Image 8: Bayon Design, captured by Scott Hargis. Featuring SUGAR BOMB.

VULCANALIA

Even the gods needed a maker.

August 23 marks Vulcanalia, the ancient festival honouring Vulcan, god of fire, volcanoes and metalworking.

Most gods worked with tools beyond mortal reach. Vulcan's divine work drew only on earthly means: heat, hand tools, ingenuity and dedication. With these, he became the craftsman other gods turned to for extraordinary works of armour, ornament and invention.

Vulcanalia is a chance to celebrate the divine act of making, and our own small place in a lineage of craftspeople stretching back millennia.

For the makers among you, consider this your feast day.

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Image 1: Vulcan Forges Arms for Achilles, Pierre Daret after Jacques Blanchard, 17th century.
Image 2: CRUX glass forming at Hot Haus Glass
Image 3: Venus at Vulcan's Forge, Léon Davent, c. 1540–1556.
Image 4: Bronze casting process at Meridian Sculpture

GRAMMAR FOR GROWTH

BCAA is born from one of life's most fundamental structures.

Its geometry is inspired by branched chain amino acids, essential building blocks of the proteins that build, move and repair the human body.

Perhaps that's why its form feels so familiar. Or perhaps it's because we encounter the same logic all throughout the natural world: branching, connecting, growing, at scales both microscopic and immense.

That molecular logic becomes a grammar for growth. A modular framework that can connect, divide and extend according to the space it inhabits.

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Image 1: Greg Natale, captured by Anson Smart
Image 2: Stukel Architecture, captured by simonwhitbreadphoto
Image 3: Time-lapse of kidney branching morphogenesis
Image 4: Dylan Farrell Design, captured by Felix Forest
Image 5: Studio Doherty, captured by Derek Swalwell
Image 6: Captured by Guy Lavoipierre
Image 7: Yarlung Tsangpo River, satellite capture by NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team.
Image 8: Clare Cousins, captured by Eve Wilson
Image 9: Tecture, captured by sideproject_projects
Image 10: Karl Blossfeldt, from Urformen der Kunst (1928)

IDEA AWARDS

THALAMOS has been shortlisted for the 2026 IDEA Awards in the Object, Furniture and Lighting category.

THALAMOS is a collection of five cast brass objects made as vessels for everyday ritual: sharing food, arranging flowers, holding treasured possessions, burning incense. Drawn from a stepped Art Deco geometry refined across fifteen years of practice, each piece is cast in solid brass and built to age gracefully across generations.

Congratulations to everyone shortlisted. Genuinely some of the finest designers in the game, and it shows in the work.

Thank you Australian Design Review for the ongoing support of Australian design.

IDEA Award winners announced in November.

Explore THALAMOS via the link in profile.

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Photographer: Matthew McQuiggan

IDEA AWARDS

GENESIS has been shortlisted for the 2026 IDEA Awards in the Event category.

Staged for Melbourne Art Fair's inaugural FUTUREOBJEKT salon, GENESIS was our first collection comprised entirely of limited edition works: fifteen years of signature forms distilled into a suspended constellation of fire, stone and light.

Congratulations to all those who are shortlisted. It's an honour to be among such strong company.

Thank you to everyone who helped bring this origin story into being. Thank you Australian Design Review for your ongoing support of Australian design. Thank you Melbourne Art Fair and FUTUREOBJEKT, we’ll see you in February 2027.

IDEA Award winners announced in November.

Explore the GENESIS collection via the link in profile.

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Photographer: Guy Lavoipierre

Over the next 24 hours, the sky is putting on a show. Three celestial events, each remarkable in its own right, converging within a single day.

TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE
The Moon will completely cover the Sun along a path through northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain. Throughout much of Europe, parts of North America and northwest Africa, millions more will experience a partial eclipse.

SIX PLANETS AT DAWN
Mercury • Mars • Jupiter • Saturn • Uranus • Neptune
Six planets strung along the arc of the ecliptic in the pre-dawn sky. Mars and Saturn will be easily visible to the naked eye, with Mercury and Jupiter lower in the dawn light. Uranus and Neptune will need binoculars or a telescope.

PERSEID METEOR SHOWER
One of the year’s great meteor showers reaches its peak overnight into August 13.
A New Moon leaves the sky especially dark, creating ideal conditions for the Perseids to streak overhead.

Most of this spectacle will unfold across Northern Hemisphere skies.

Check a local sky guide for what’s visible in your region.

Wherever you are: take a moment to gaze up, as we have for millennia.

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Image 1: Total solar eclipse, NASA/Joel Kowsky
Image 2: Total solar eclipse composite, NASA/Keegan Barber
Image 3: Six-planet composite assembled from NASA imagery. Source credits: Johns Hopkins APL/Carnegie, Malin Space Science Systems, JPL-Caltech; Jupiter processed by Kevin M. Gill (CC BY).
Image 4: Perseid meteor shower, NASA/Bill Ingalls
Image 5: Transparent Solar System, James Reynolds, c. 1846–1860

THE COLLECTOR’S EYE

Jeff and Mariko Provan have spent decades collecting the objects that speak to them most. Their Melbourne terrace is a living archive of instinct and curiosity.

"Houses should continually evolve as new things are discovered"
– Jeff Provan

Among the newer arrivals, BCAA is suspended from the original 1870s ceiling rose. Hand-moulded foliage above, branching form below, a century and a half between them.

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Photographer: Eve Wilson
Featured in: The Design Files and Habitus Living
Project: Albert Park House, designed by Clare Cousins, Clare McAllister and Neometro
Lighting: BCAA

The brief: "Moody, original, unexpected, full of character." Delivered in spades by dining room and feline alike.

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Interior Design: Melanie Turner Interiors
Project: Hyde Park
Location: Tampa, Florida
Photographer: Mali Azima
Lighting: NEPENTHES