Most of us know what a mirror is for. We look into it.
We check ourselves before leaving the house. We hang one above a console in the entrance, over a fireplace or in a bedroom because that’s traditionally where mirrors go.
But after working with mirrors for more than 30 years, I’ve come to think that looking at yourself is sometimes one of the least interesting things a mirror can do.
A mirror can bring a garden into a room. It can borrow light from somewhere else. It can give a confined dining area a feeling of space, introduce movement to a quiet wall or create what feels like another window.
And sometimes it can simply be a beautiful piece of sculpture or art.
That’s really where my approach to designer mirrors begins. I don’t necessarily start by asking, What shape should the mirror be?
I start by asking:
What do I want the mirror to do?
Before choosing a mirror, look in the opposite direction
It’s something I’ve learnt over many years of working in people’s homes.
When someone shows me the wall where they’re considering a mirror, I’m interested in that wall — but I’m just as interested in turning around.
What is the mirror going to reflect?
Because you’re not simply placing an object on a wall. You’re deciding what you’re going to bring back into the room.
Perhaps there’s a garden opposite. Perhaps there’s wonderful natural light. Maybe there’s an artwork, an architectural detail or simply an interesting part of the home that deserves to be seen from another perspective.
But there are times when the opposite is true.
I’ve looked at walls where technically a mirror would fit beautifully, but the reflection wouldn’t. A doorway, an awkward corner or something you simply don’t need to see twice.
In those situations, I might say, Don’t put a mirror there.
A beautiful mirror can’t make an ugly reflection beautiful.
That’s why placement, scale and proportion are every bit as important to me as the mirror itself.
A mirror that became another window
One project from quite a few years ago has always stayed with me.
I had made an entertainment unit and coffee table for a client’s family room. It was a lovely room with a large expanse of windows overlooking a beautifully maintained, tree-lined garden.
The clients asked me whether I had ever worked with mirrors.
They had a long blank wall opposite the garden and wanted to do something with it, but they weren’t looking for a conventional decorative mirror.
What developed was a long, relatively narrow box-frame mirror, around two metres in length, with the mirror itself deliberately set on an angle.
That angle was everything.
When you sat in the room, the mirror wasn’t really reflecting you. It caught the trees and garden outside and brought them onto the opposite wall.
Suddenly the garden existed on both sides of the room.
There was movement as people passed through, certainly, but the hero wasn’t the person looking into the mirror. It was the life outside.
The mirror had effectively become another window.
That project probably explains better than anything why I’ve remained fascinated by mirrors.
A mirror doesn’t always have to be something you look into. Sometimes it’s something you look through.
Designing with mirror, rather than designing around it
Traditionally, much of mirror design has been about the frame.
The frame might be restrained and modern, heavily ornate, gilded, timber, metal, Baroque, Victorian or contemporary — but fundamentally there is a piece of mirror with something designed around it.
I became interested in turning that thinking around.
What happens if the mirror itself becomes the material you’re designing with?
Can some of the silvering disappear? Can clear glass become part of the composition? Can the structure sit behind the mirror instead of around it? Can artwork become part of the piece? Can the mirror change as you walk past it?
That thinking has become central to the designer mirrors we make here in Melbourne, and one of the earliest examples was the Retro mirror.
Retro — the beginning of something different
Retro came from experimentation.
I’d already played with partial frames and different ways of changing the dynamics of a conventional mirror, but I wanted to push the idea further.
Eventually I developed a way of removing sections of the silvering from the mirror itself, leaving three clear glass areas around the central reflective section. Behind that I designed an angled timber structure.
So the frame was still there — but it sat within the boundaries of the glass.
The clear areas appeared to float and gradually merge into the wall.
As you moved past it, you caught glimpses of timber, the angle of the structure, the wall behind and changing reflections. Nothing physically moved, yet the mirror changed as you moved around it.
That became the beginning of a whole family of ideas.
We’ve made Retro in natural oak, walnut, smoked and limed finishes, black and subdued neutrals, but also in much more playful colours. We’ve changed its proportions and made vertical and horizontal versions when the architecture or space called for it.
Eventually I developed a round version that can be positioned in eight different orientations, changing the balance and character of the piece depending on how it is placed.
That’s something I still like about the design today.
It doesn’t need to follow a trend to feel current.
For me, good design should be able to live through trends rather than belong to one.
And when someone invests in a piece, I like the idea that it can move with them. A mirror that was vertical in one home might work horizontally in another. A different orientation can give the same piece another life.
There’s a sustainability in that longevity too.
When the architecture gives you the answer
Sometimes the design doesn’t begin with experimentation. It begins with a particular problem.
The Lois mirror is a good example.
Lois was a client in South Yarra with a beautiful, stately home. The front rooms retained wonderful traditional detailing — cornices, architraves, timber floors, rugs, fireplaces and beautifully chosen older furniture. The rear of the home had been modernised, but sensitively, so the old and new still belonged together.
After completing several pieces for the newer part of the house, Lois asked me about a mirror above the fireplace in the traditional dining room.
She had looked around, but everything she found seemed to be another version of the expected traditional mirror — substantial decorative frames, often gilded in gold or silver.
She wanted something different, but it still needed to belong to that room.
That was the challenge.
Eventually I thought: what if we keep the idea of the traditional frame, but put it behind the mirror?
We created a large mirror with clear glass revealed around its edges and floated it forward from a concealed structure. But rather than inventing an arbitrary frame profile, I borrowed a detail that was already in the house.
The skirting.
We adapted its proportions and used that architectural language in the structure behind the glass, finishing it in a deeper complementary tone.
Sometimes designing something new isn’t about introducing a foreign idea. It’s about looking carefully at what’s already there and finding a new way to speak the same language.
A little playfulness belongs in serious design
Not every mirror begins with a client’s problem.
Sometimes an idea starts because I’m looking at something completely unrelated and think, What if?
Cloud began like that.
I was sitting outside looking up at cloud formations and started thinking about their softness — the way they don’t have a hard visual edge and seem to dissolve into the sky.
Why couldn’t a mirror do that?
I developed Cloud in three sizes so they could work individually or be grouped together. The central reflective area gives the piece substance, while the surrounding treatment gradually breaks away into clear glass.
The mirror almost dissolves into the wall.
Cloud later went on to be shortlisted in the VIVID Design Awards, but its beginning was simply curiosity.
And I think that’s important.
Designer mirrors don’t always have to be serious objects to be considered serious design. There can be playfulness in a sophisticated interior. There can be softness in a formal room.
Every home is different, so why should every mirror behave in the same way?
Not every mirror needs to show your face
Some of our mirrors deliberately sit low.
The long horizontal mirrors we’ve designed for above buffets are a good example. At that height, you’re unlikely to stand in front of one checking your hair before you leave the house.
That isn’t really their purpose.
Instead, the mirror introduces another visual layer. It catches movement around a dining table, changes in daylight, perhaps a window or something happening in another part of the room.
You might only catch part of a person as they walk past.
And that’s enough.
The reflection gives the room life without demanding attention.
It’s another example of why I don’t believe the amount of mirror, its height or even its conventional usefulness should determine whether a design works.
Sometimes a little reflection in exactly the right place can do far more than a large mirror in the wrong one.
From an idea in my head to something on the wall
The making is another part of the story, although I don’t think every technical detail needs explaining.
Some processes are highly specialised. Glass may be CNC cut to a particular shape; some pieces require sandblasting or specialist bevel work. The random hand-bevelled edges of our Shard mirror, for example, require a particular glass specialist.
But a great deal also happens by hand in the studio.
And quite often the first step is surprisingly simple.
I’ll draw a mirror out full-size — sometimes directly onto a sheet of MDF — because seeing something at one-to-one scale tells you things a small drawing simply can’t.
An idea can look completely right in my head and then I stand in front of the full-size drawing and think:
No. That’s not right.
Perhaps a section is too wide. Maybe the balance needs shifting. Should it divide into thirds rather than quarters? Does one area need more breathing space?
So it changes.
With designs such as Dress Code, those decisions are particularly important. Its clear strips take some of their inspiration from seams and pleats in clothing and couture. The widths vary, so finding the right rhythm is a matter of judgement rather than simply repeating a mathematical pattern.
Other mirrors incorporate hand-applied artwork or processes where the reflective surface itself is manipulated. Pieces such as Geo involve several layers of work. Eclipse has its own hand-finished elements. Cloud has areas worked by hand, meaning each develops a slight individuality of its own.
There are specialist processes and there is technology, certainly.
But there are also hands, eyes and judgement.
And I like that.
The final design decision happens in the room
For our Melbourne clients, the process can continue right through to installation.
And installation isn’t simply drilling a couple of holes and hanging a mirror.
For me, it’s the final design decision.
A mirror may need to sit centrally — or deliberately off-centre. Moving it slightly can completely change what it reflects. Height changes the view. Orientation changes the composition.
That’s why I’ll sometimes visit a client’s home before a decision is made and talk through which mirror I think will work, which one might work — and which ones I wouldn’t recommend at all.
Then there’s a lovely moment when the finished piece finally arrives.
You’ve discussed it. It’s been designed. It’s been made. You’ve imagined it on that wall.
And now here it is.
We determine the position, the height and the orientation. The mirror goes onto the wall.
And suddenly the room changes.
There’s the drama.
Perhaps the mirror isn’t the hero after all
I’ve been designing and working with mirrors in one form or another for more than 30 years, and I’m still exploring what they can do.
Our collection at Special Things has grown considerably, with more designs still developing, but I’m not particularly interested in creating another mirror simply because the range needs another shape.
There needs to be an idea.
Sometimes that idea is sculpture. Sometimes it’s architecture. Sometimes it’s light, colour, movement, proportion or playfulness.
And sometimes it’s simply finding a way of letting a beautiful garden appear on another wall.
So perhaps I was wrong about one thing.
The mirror isn’t really the hero of the story.
The hero is what happens to the room because the mirror is there.
The corner that no longer feels dark. The dining room that suddenly seems to extend beyond its walls. The garden you can now see from a seat that used to face a blank wall. The fleeting movement and changing light you notice without ever consciously looking at yourself.
That’s when a mirror stops being something placed on a wall and starts becoming part of the way a home feels.
And perhaps that’s the most interesting reflection of all.