Image credit: Sam McAdam-Cooper
Founder and Creative Director of House of Heras - a boutique design studio in Sydney Australia, Silvana specialises in highly decorative designs applied to a variety of mediums including fabrics, crockery, rugs and wallpaper.
She has a fine pedigree in original design at the top of the game, working for 17 years as head designer for Bazmark Inc. with Catherine Martin and Baz Luhrmann on some of Australia’s best-loved films and theatre shows such as Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom The Musical. She was Assistant Costume Designer on The Great Gatsby, which won an Academy Award and BAFTA for Costume Design.
But it was the subsequent collaboration with Catherine Martin on her homewares business that allowed Silvana to find new inspiration and a direction that honed and challenged her design chops. As told to The Grace Tales: “I’d built a career off designing things that were beautiful to look at, but the way the decorative arts forced me to consider both form and function was an epiphany.”
Arriving to Australia from Lebanon as a child, Silvana had sat with her mother at work making women’s garments in a factory in Summer Hill. She would experiment with different fabrics, colours and textures - and this would lay the foundation for her wild imagination and future career.
Fast forward to March 2021 and, off the back of the success of the first exclusive collaboration with Designer Rugs, House of Heras has just launched a second collection, ‘The Birds And The Bees’. These new designs - while building on Australian flora and fauna as seen through the lens of the Arts and Crafts movement, have a deeper and more opulent colour palette of teal green, burgundy and coral, inspired by 70’s design.
“I've always had a love of the 1970s…I still have vivid memories of specific clothes, homewares and packaging from around my childhood home during those early years.”
Consisting of four rectangular rugs and one round rug, this collection is hand-tufted from 100% New Zealand wool, with highlights of shimmering bamboo silk. They are divine, on site now at Designer Rugs and Silvana is happy to discuss custom shapes, sizes and colours. Read more about it here.
If you are an artisan or know one who might like to be featured on this site, please send an email to nina@hearth-co.com