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Hello, you - welcome and thank you for stopping by.
My name is Carla and I'm the creator of Studio Et Al. I'd like to share some significant parts of my journey which brought me to this place in time.
In 2008, whilst studying a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Monash University, Melbourne, I flippantly selected "Metals + Jewellery" as one of my many electives. I was a beading nerd as a teenager when that was the cool thing and thought "why not?!". It's a little cliche, I know, but I fell instantly in love and the rest, as they say, is history.
I decided to defer my bachelor and opted for a Jewellery TAFE course instead, where I could gain more than just the conceptual and develop my hand skills and traditional metal fabrication. I was accepted at NMIT (now Melbourne Polytechnic) studying and completing an Advanced Diploma of Engineering Technology (fancy, I know - it was just jewellery design and fabrication).
I practiced as a Jeweller for a number of years and then my interests began gravitating towards Architecture and Interior Design. The shift between industries happened almost without noticing. I decided to back my passion with a qualification and gained my Diploma of Interior Design and Decoration in 2018 at Billy Blue College of Design. All the while, I was living my 9-5 by selling commercial furniture to end users, architects and designers dreaming of the day when I could do my side hustle full time.
In 2019, on a trip to Japan, my creative juices began to flow and furniture designs came pouring out of me (sometimes in the middle of the night, crazy scientist-style, scribbling in a notebook). Since then, I've been sketching and re-sketching various designs with several of them currently in production. I'm really excited to see my thoughts come off the pages and into people's homes.
Stay tuned and get in touch.
- Carla