What are some of the achievements and awards of Hecker Phelan & Guthrie?
Hecker Phelan & Guthrie have been in practice now for about 10 years. And in that time we have worked on a myriad of projects and I think some the highlights have been the establishment in Sydney which have been recently finished and this is a huge project – a hospitality project. We had a client, Justin who wanted to create an enormous venue that was an extension of his home where he could invite his favourite 5000 closest friends to and we created in the middle of Sydney, 2 city blocks of bars and nightclubs and there is swimming pool on the roof and it’s an extraordinary environment. And that was 5 or 6 years in the making. It recently won Best Hospitality Award, Best Interior Design Award in Australia. Last year we completed a French Restaurant in Melbourne for Guillaume Brahimi who has the French restaurant at the Opera House, and we created for him one in Melbourne and that won Best Restaurant for 2007 for Australia. We’ve worked on some very exciting projects – we also won in 2007 Best New Boutique Hotel in Asia for the JIA Hotel in Shanghai. We had a lot of interesting projects in recent times. People in Melbourne would know intimately on projects like Kom which is a big Victorian Club which was very popular in the 80’s and then became quite derelict and then we revived it in the last few years and it was quite extraordinary.  The Prince Hotel is also another project that we were very proud of.

What are the inspirations for Kenny Heights Sanctuary?
I think there are a series in terms of what particular inspirations that we had for the Kenny Heights Sanctuary. We had a whole series and it probably almost sounds cliché but there is a sense of resort style living. I think that is very much when you look at the master plan for Kenny Heights, there is retail, and there’s commercial, and there’s residential. But ultimately as a development, it has this sense of a resort and certainly that has inspired the way that we’ve approached it – we’ve also approached it from the fact that these are people’s individual homes, and rather than taking it from the perspective of being an apartment in a large development. We’ve had the luxury of being able to design these as homes and I think they have the quality of that in the design – the fact that we have beautiful timber doors throughout the apartment, the beautiful timber lined kitchen, the beautiful bespoke joinery, I mean that that are one of the few words in the mind that we designed specially for this development. We’ve been quite intentional in the design process to make sure there’s uniqueness to what we do, a bespoke quality to what we do, and that there is still an underlying, a fundamentally modern, contemporary approach.  The other thing that we were very mindful of was that we’ve kept the palette very simple – there is one stone, one timber, one paint colour throughout, but it is a beautiful, calm, palette.  And so there is a whole lot of inspiration – some of them are about how we want people to feel in the space, others are more about the materiality of the space and then the esthetics is that it is about the simple beautiful quality, the lighting quality so we think a lot about lighting levels and how we are going to light it. Ultimately this is someone’s home we are creating, and we are mindful that we have to keep coming back to that thinking about how I would like to live in this space.

What are your views and involvement in Kenny Heights and Kenny Heights Sanctuary?
We are involved with Kenny Heights Sanctuary, and at the moment we’ve designed apartments for one building. It’s been an incredibly exciting process because being from Melbourne, we were unaware, we were approached to be involved in this project and it wasn’t until we came to Malaysia and saw how large this project was, and also the caliber of designers working in this. I mean, we feel humbled to be included in a group of designers that include Sir Terence Conran. It is an honour to be included in the company of designers like Sir Terence Conran.  And to be a part of what I think is an extraordinary development that is certainly of a standard that we’ve never been involved with before, and also I’ve not seen the lights before and it’s extraordinary that this could be happening in Malaysia, and it was just something that we were not aware of. So we are thrilled, I mean we started this process and were very happy to be involved, but like I said, it’s not until you only have to look at the quality of the space we are sitting in to realize how extraordinary this design project really is. We’ve now designed the apartments for his particular building - I think its Building A, and we can’t wait to see the built form, the finished product.

Paul Hecker is one of the founding Directors of the preeminent design firm Hecker Phelan & Guthrie.  This boutique firm are responsible for some of Australia’s leading hospitality, residential & retail projects. Paul has over 15 years experience in the industry and has built a highly regarded profile as a leading interior designer. Some of HP&G’s recognised projects  include ivy & The Establishment in Sydney, Comme, Longrain & The Prince in Melbourne just to name a few. Paul is passionate about materiality, greenery and how people interact with the interior.