Tom Fereday’s Cove lounge and table pictured alongside Charlie White’s modular Spear series. Photo by Pier Carthew.

Installation view across the rooms of North Melbourne’s Meat Market Stables. Photo by Pier Carthew.

Mano is a limited edition series of sculptural tables by Tom Fereday. Photo by Sevak Babakhani.

Process shot of foam by Charlie White. Photo courtesy of designer.

Sydney-based Tom Fereday and Melbourne-based Charlie White have presented Versa, a joint show at this year’s Melbourne Design Week. Meaning to be ‘turned’ or ‘changed’ in Latin, the collaborative series of installations were linked through each designer’s use of end-of-life materials. The exhibition showcases a collection of unique furniture and architectural elements, made by Tom and Charlie respectively, tailored to the three spaces of the Meat Market Stables in North Melbourne.

Developed through a process of independent collaboration, the pair sought to create a series of works that explore the turning of waste materials and the challenging of their perceived value. With a self-imposed constraint to make only one design gesture each per room, works have been conceived as the transformation of a material into an interior element—seat, table, light, ceiling, wall & floor—designed to express a sensory quality—dark, light, soft, warm, sharp and hard.

The complementary contrasts of the two designers’ works in each setting create singularly harmonious spaces—an ode to the power of collaboration. “We have quite different practices, but a similar sensibility to how we approach materials,” explains Charlie. “It is interesting to collaborate at this point in our careers together,” Tom adds, continuing: “First and foremost we are friends. We’d been discussing a project where we’re creating our own individual works but showing them together. We want to create a dialogue where there is a little bit of tension between our different aesthetics.”

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