When people talk about nature in the home, the conversation often becomes about plants — the shorthand we’ve developed for “bringing the outdoors in”. A trailing vine here, a potted tree there. But plants are only one domesticated expression of this.
I’ve always been drawn to a more elusive sense of wildness. When I’m at home, I want to feel transformed — transplanted into a landscape shaped by creativity, memory and identity, and full of objects gathered along life’s path that carry a sense of the untamed. Design that draws on nature, but which dares to mix inspiration from different plants, personal histories and emotions has a unique kind of wildness in my eyes.
Growing up in Auckland, our garden was a place of delicious disorder: citrus trees dropping fruit faster than we could gather it; sun-warmed soil under bare feet. Much of my childhood was spent outdoors on my great-uncle’s farm, where he would arrive from the paddocks carrying some small creature — a baby rabbit, a bird, something that needed brief sheltering — or a bucket of small eels destined for the farm cat’s dinner plate.
In the Cox home, ‘texture and patina absorb chaos and return calm, rather than announcing themselves as design gestures’ © Inge Clemente
