Stories

With the opening of the Melbourne Experience Centre, Fisher & Paykel continues its global rollout of bespoke, natural-material-driven environments.

The Melbourne Experience Centre is the brand’s third new luxury space to open, following the Auckland Experience Centre in late 2022 and the London Experience Centre in February this 2024.

Through bespoke kitchens and fabric care spaces, the brand showcases the aesthetic refinement and technical performance of its appliance ecosystem.

The result of a design partnership with Clare Cousins Architects, the Fisher & Paykel Melbourne Experience Centre brings to life the concept of Designed in New Zealand through an elemental approach and material selections that establish a meaningful connection to the place.

Local references include the rammed Victorian-earth welcome station, locally sourced bluestone and spotted gum timber, as well as the creation of the distinctive palladiana floor using red bricks.

The Social Kitchen Table is a tactile, robust, live-edge timber table sourced sustainably in the Otway State Forest.

The brief was to make a kitchen table that needed to be tactile and robust. The material was to be sourced locally and sustainably, with live edge and Simple structure.

Made By Morgen provided an initial design proposal to their client Fisher & Paykel, which included expressed book-matched blackwood slabs and blade leg structure with half-housed joinery throughout.

Once the proposal was approved, the main challenge was sourcing slabs long enough to achieve the final dimensions of 3700 x 1200. We engaged Will Butler from Billies Blackwood to help achieve this goal. Will has been harvesting Otway Blackwood in the Otway State Forest with a Forest Produce license following the Code of Practice for Timber Production 2014.

All timber is harvested by hand with only a chainsaw and carried out by hand without machinery. Utilising only fallen logs and residual timber left behind from Specialty timber harvesters who practice single tree selection for tone wood timbers.