The inaugural Design Depot: a biophilic journey by season

Every circuit needs a heart, and in 2024 we built one. The Design Depot took over the Sapphire Room at Ponsonby Central and turned it into a single, walkable installation: a biophilic journey that asked what it feels like to move through nature indoors, by season. It was designed by Samantha Elliot of Studio Elliot in collaboration with a group of suppliers who each brought their own material to the experience, Heritage Carpets, Miranda Brown, Autex, Greenair, Resene, and Spacebar Design.

One room, organised like a compass

Rather than a set of stands, the Design Depot was laid out as a journey. The space was organised around the four directions, each tied to an element and a season, so that a visitor moved from Fire and Summer through Air and Spring, Water and Autumn, and Earth and Winter. Across those quarters sat 11 named zones, each a small world of its own: a Zen Garden of stepping stones and Japanese-inspired planting, a Beach Campfire with a fire pit and log seating, a Winter Garden framed by a planted archway.

The makers behind the materials

The pleasure of the Depot was in the detail, and the detail was in the materials. Autex built the entrance archway from lasercut fins and hung a suspended Cascade overhead. Miranda Brown collaborated with Heritage Carpets on a rug that was used for the Blue Hole, with a suspended ring and curtains around it, lit from within. Resene hung wallpaper representative of the sky in the cloud room. Greenair carried the planting the whole way through, from low and architectural to tall and tropical, and Spacebar Design set out modular furniture that visitors could handle and rearrange, wrapped in Critical with a custom etched design by Te Ari Prendergast of Warren and Mahoney.

Studio Elliot held it together, with Samantha Elliot leading the design. The result read less like a trade display and more like a landscape you had wandered into, which was the whole idea. A festival themed Bold + Brave needed a centrepiece that trusted its audience to walk slowly and look closely, and the Depot did.

A space that did more than sit still

The Design Depot was not only something to look at. On the Friday morning of the festival it hosted a wellness session with Kayla Gordine, a biophilia-themed meditation and sound experience set inside the installation, using the planting and the quiet of the room as its setting. The space also carried the private launch of the new collaboration between Heritage and Miranda Brown, staged in the environment the two had helped build.

For a first-year festival, the Depot was a statement of intent. It showed what happens when suppliers stop thinking in stands and start thinking in rooms, and it gave the Design Depot name its first real meaning. Everything about it, from the compass logic to the hung rugs and the sensory experience, said that this was a design festival prepared to make something, not just show it.