Australian studio Cordon Salon takes an anthropological approach to design

In a former life, Australian designer Ella Saddington worked in fashion: over a decade, she recalls witnessing ‘the slow unravelling of what was once a thriving and diverse local manufacturing sector,’ from textile production, hand cutting and sewing operations, to tailoring. This inspired her to shift her focus to craft ‘not just as an aesthetic choice, but as a form of resilience, a kind of memory, and a way of staying materially connected to the world around us.’ To her admission, she has since become an evangelist for vocational training and skill transmission: ‘I believe hands-on knowledge is vital, not nostalgic, but forward-facing. It’s a way of thinking as much as doing.’

Cordon Salon: welcome to Ella Saddington's multifaceted creative universe

A creative that doesn’t fit into a tight definition (words like craftsperson, artist, and researcher equally describe her practice), Saddington started her studio Cordon Salon as a route to the exploration of skills and craft from an anthropological context, merging knowledge and theory to create something tangible and meaningful that is both reflective of artisanal traditions and explores that are the possible futures of craft.

Growing up on a farm (‘not quite the outback, but remote enough that resourcefulness was essential, when something broke or needed fixing, you couldn’t just head to the shops’), Saddington learned from an early age about problem solving. ‘That environment taught me to observe closely, to understand how things were made, and to learn by doing,’ she says. ‘Often you’d pick up knowledge by looking at how someone else had solved a problem, or by paying attention to the remnants of past repairs. Even now, I find myself noticing how things are joined or how someone has patched a leaky tap. I’m still drawn to those quiet moments of everyday design and improvisation. That mindset of problem-solving, noticing, and giving something a go still underpins the way I work today.’

Craftsmanship has underpinned her career from the start: when asked about mentors and inspirations to her work, she credits her late grandmother, whose attitude was that making things by hand was always going to be more valuable than buying. ‘That stuck,’ she notes. The work of masters of craft like William Morris and Josef Hoffman has also been influential in shaping her career in design, for their world-building approach, but ultimately, she admits that inspiration comes from right around her: ‘it’s the people around me who have had the biggest impact, there’s a really special community of artists, designers, and craftspeople here in Australia. We push each other, support each other, and hold each other accountable in all the best ways.’

Among her most significant design projects so far is a collection of lamps made of stainless steel and aluminium. Titled ‘Garniture’, the series was informed by a 2024 applied research fellowship with the International Specialised Skills Institute, for which she travelled across Europe exploring Western European plate steel armour from a historical and technical perspective. ‘The experience was completely transformative and reshaped the way I think about design,’ she says. ‘It gave me the confidence to draw from the past not out of nostalgia, but as a source of technical, material, and conceptual innovation.’ Observing the lamps, their metal sheets folded onto a conical shape, it is clear how the experience was distilled and modernised into a concise design language.

Her ongoing series of mirrors is equal part functional design, artwork and visual poetry. Made of sheets of glass with irregular colour blobs framing the surface, they are the result of a rigorous process of several steps that include diamond-polishing, silver pouring, spraying colour - each object is different, and the concept has also been translated into colourful room dividers that help showcase the resulting glowing colours and reflections.

Looking for a thread connecting her work isn’t immediate, as all her collections and design explorations seem worlds apart from one another. From prism lights to waxed steel vessels and lamps, what connects her work, she explains, is the concept of transformation, how materials respond to a process and how making can enhance their characteristics. ‘I’ve worked with everything from metal, glass, textiles and plaster,’ she says, also adding that much of her work is about finding contemporary applications for production processes that have been forgotten. So far, her material library includes materials and techniques such as scagliola, stained glass, etching and engraving.

‘For me, it’s about finding the right material for the right idea, and then letting the process guide me,’ she explains. ‘I also think a lot about how materials can carry narrative. How they age, how they’re touched, how they speak to the time they were made in. If an object can tell a story, that’s successful for me.’