Concrete Jungle

October 2015, By Nicole Langelier

I’m a city girl and having spent my whole adult life in NYC (before escaping to Italy where I lived for 5 years before moving to Australia in 2012), I love – and will always love – the  sprawling landscape of a concrete city.

The first time I really fell in love with concrete as a design feature was Circa 1998 I believe, when couple of friends of mine opened one of the first restaurants in NOLITA in Manhattan in a former parking garage (www.peasantnyc.com). Armed with a great chef but only a shoe string budget, they polished the concrete garage floors and built a wood burning brick oven in the back of the garage, to create one of NY’s newest hot spots that is still going today, close to 20 years on (the restaurant business in NYC is operates in dog years: 1 year = 7, so 140 years is not bad).

The floors though… I never did get them off my mind.

Fast forward 10 years and I was living in Milan with my handsome Diplomat. When he left the government and we had to move out of the official residence, I scoured the city until I found the right place to call home. We moved into the coolest apartment to date that I have ever lived in (and that is saying a lot considering I lived in The Hotel Chelsea in NYC for 10 years). 

The apartment was owned by an architect and his wife and they hadn’t lived there since the 80’s when he gutted the ‘trilocale’ and turned it into his very ‘Memphis’ inspired bachelor pad. As he had been a bachelor, his new wife moved them out of there in a hurry, and then some years later when I saw it for the first time I do believe no one had set foot in the place for over 20 years. It was like a time capsule. There was an inch of dust covering everything – there was laundry in the cupboards and in the washer, there was food in the fridge, there was even a roast in the oven. All dried and shriveled and filthy – and I knew from the first second that I walked in there that it was the home for us. 

It was open plan apart from two bedrooms. It had 2 balconies, timber floors, brightly painted exposed internal service piping like the Pompidou center in Paris, original Castiglioni ‘Frisbi’ and ‘ Parenthesis’ lighting, and selected raw board formwork concrete walls. There were so many wonders to this apartment, and it was the way all of these features played against one another that made it so perfect, yet is was always the concrete that really ‘floated my boat’. Perhaps a longing for my city that lives inside of me still…

These days you would have to have your head in the clouds not to notice the influx of concrete products available out there. There are concrete table lamps, concrete tables, concrete bowls and vases, concrete planters, book ends, pendant lights, stools – etc. etc. Concrete, as much as I despise the term, is ‘on trend’ and has been for a little while now.

Generally speaking by the time something is available to the masses at K-Mart, it is on its way out, but to me concrete in its many forms is a beautiful and timeless material, and although you may not love your concrete vase in a year or two, the integrity of the humble material will stand the test of time, I promise you.