Gabriel Saunders is known for visualisation — for images that bring architecture and interiors to life before a single wall is built. But there is another side to this studio, less visible in profile and deeply personal in practice: physical interior styling. The kind of work where decisions are made not with a mouse, but with your hands. Where a room is felt before it is finished.
Middle Park is that work. When the project was complete, we were so proud of what the team had achieved that we wanted it properly celebrated — photographed by Shannon McGrath and entered into the 2025 Interior Design Excellence Awards (IDEA). We are proud to share that the studio has since been shortlisted as a finalist under the category of Residential Interior Curation.
Where the digital ends, the physical begins
For a studio that spends most of its days in the digital realm, there is something genuinely arresting about returning to the physical. No infinite undo. The room is what the room is, and it asks you to commit.
With Middle Park, we were engaged to style the interior of a Melbourne workers cottage — our brief to find the space between the client's aesthetic and our own, threading through a considered peppering of Gabriel Saunders while ensuring the home felt entirely theirs. That balance is something we take seriously. A styled home should feel like the person who lives in it.
The village it takes
Physical styling stretches your world in directions you don't anticipate. It sends you places you wouldn't otherwise go.
For Middle Park, that meant scouring the Footscray Markets for the right octopus tentacles — yes, really. It meant six people navigating a bespoke Ross Gardam stone dining table through the narrow corridors of the cottage to its rightful place at the back of the home. It meant time spent in the treasure trove that is Pepite Studio, finding ceramics that reward a second look. And placing a Kerry Armstrong painting — sourced through Studio Gallery — on a wall that seemed to have been waiting for it.
To Pepite, Ross Gardam, Studio Gallery, Rachel Donath, and Armadillo & Co: our wholehearted thanks. Beautiful spaces like Middle Park are not the work of one hand — they are the result of makers, artists, designers, and curators who bring rigour and craft to everything they do.
When the home was complete, we called Shannon McGrath. Her photographs hold the space with exactly the sensitivity it deserved.
Being shortlisted by the IDEA Awards matters to us because this recognition belongs to the team — to every person who sourced, carried, placed, and refined until the space was right. The physical styling practice at Gabriel Saunders is not new. It is, in many ways, where the studio began. In the conviction that understanding how people live is inseparable from the ability to show how they might.
Middle Park is a reminder of why we love this work.