We were thinking of putting a mirror here. What do you think?
I’ve been asked that question many times over the years, usually while standing with a customer in their home, both of us looking at a blank wall.
My answer is often another question.
What do you want the mirror to do?
Because choosing a mirror isn’t really about filling an empty wall.
Before I start thinking about the mirror itself, I’m looking at the room around it. I’m looking at the furniture, the architecture, the light, the proportions and, importantly, what the mirror is going to reflect.
I’m also looking at the people who live there.
How do they use the room? How do they move through it? Is this a space they pass through quickly, or somewhere they sit every evening? Does the room already feel open, or does it need a little help?
Sometimes a mirror needs to bring light into a darker part of a home. Sometimes it needs to make a narrow dining area feel more open. It might capture a garden outside a window, create movement as you walk through a hallway, or simply become a beautiful object in its own right.
And sometimes the best advice I can give is that the mirror someone originally imagined for the space is simply too small.
That’s where the conversation begins.
It’s not just about the wall
One of the first things I do is look in the opposite direction.
What will we actually see in the mirror?
That might sound obvious, but it’s something people can easily overlook.
You can choose a beautiful designer mirror, put it on what appears to be the perfect wall and then discover that its main view is a doorway, a television or something you never particularly wanted to look at twice.
Move that same mirror slightly, change its height or alter its proportions, and suddenly it might pick up a garden, a window, an artwork or another interesting part of the architecture.
Now the mirror is doing something.
It is bringing another part of the home into the room.
I particularly love it when we can capture greenery from outside. A mirror can almost become another window. As the light changes during the day, the reflection changes with it. People walk past. Leaves move outside. The room has life and movement.
That is very different from simply hanging something on a wall because there was an empty space there.
What does the room need?
This is where my furniture background becomes important.
I’ve been designing and making furniture for more than 30 years, and I tend to look at mirrors in much the same way I look at furniture — in relation to everything around them.
If we’re standing in a dining room, for example, I’m not looking at the mirror in isolation. I’m looking at the dining table, the chairs, the buffet, the ceiling height, the width of the wall and the space people need to move around the table.
A dining area can sometimes feel quite contained once you introduce a substantial table and chairs.
A carefully positioned mirror can completely change that feeling.
It can visually push the wall away, bring another part of the home into view and create a sense of space beyond the physical dimensions of the room.
That doesn’t mean the mirror has to be enormous.
It means it has to be in proportion.
And proportion is something I talk about with customers all the time.
“Are you sure that isn’t too big?”
Quite often, when I suggest increasing the size of a mirror, there’s a moment of hesitation.
“Won’t that be too big?”
Usually, no.
People are understandably cautious about scale. They don’t want something to overwhelm the room, so the natural tendency is often to go smaller.
But going too small can have exactly the opposite effect.
A small mirror floating in the middle of a substantial wall can actually emphasise how large and empty that wall is. The mirror feels disconnected from the furniture beneath it and from the architecture around it.
Increase the dimensions and something interesting happens.
The pieces start talking to one another.
A console and mirror begin to read as a composition. A mirror above a buffet starts relating properly to its length. A full-length dressing mirror becomes part of the architecture rather than something that looks as though it has simply been added afterwards.
Sometimes 100 or 200 millimetres can make an enormous difference.
There isn’t a mathematical formula that works in every home. You have to look at the space.
That’s why, when I’m helping a customer choose from our designer mirrors, I’m interested in the room first and the product second.
The right answer comes from understanding both.
A hallway can become more than a passage
Hallways and entrances are particularly interesting because they’re often treated simply as transitional spaces.
You walk through them to get somewhere else.
But a mirror can change that.
In an entrance, it can give you that practical last look before leaving the house, but it can also establish the character of the home the moment somebody walks through the door.
Further down a hallway, a mirror can break up a long wall, reflect light from an adjoining room or create the impression that the space continues beyond where it actually finishes.
Again, I’m asking the same questions.
What will it reflect?
Where will you first see it?
What happens as you walk towards it?
Does it need to quietly open the space, or should it be the hero?
Those questions lead us towards the shape, scale, colour and detailing of the mirror.
Not the other way around.
Sometimes the mirror should be the hero
I don’t think every mirror needs to disappear quietly into a room.
Some should demand attention.
That’s one of the reasons we began developing our collection of designer mirrors in Melbourne in the first place.
I’ve always been interested in taking something very familiar — a piece of reflective glass — and asking what else it could become.
Over the years we’ve played with fragmented forms, coloured mirror, bronze and smoke, timber, negative space, asymmetry, floating details and reflections within reflections.
Some designs are quiet.
Others deliberately have a bit of drama.
I like both.
A mirror can sit comfortably within the architecture and quietly do its job, or it can become the piece that gives a room its personality.
But even with a strong sculptural mirror, I still come back to the room.
There is no point choosing a dramatic designer mirror simply because it looks wonderful in a photograph. It has to work when you get it home.
The design and the space need to complement one another.
The dressing mirror is a different conversation
If I’m standing with a customer in a bedroom or dressing area, the conversation changes again.
Now the mirror has a very clear job to do.
Can you actually see yourself properly?
How far can you stand back from it?
Is there enough room to get the full view?
Where is the natural light coming from?
What is happening around the mirror?
A beautiful full-length mirror that doesn’t function properly as a dressing mirror has missed the point.
That doesn’t mean it has to be purely practical. Quite the opposite. Some of our dressing mirrors are among our most sculptural designer mirrors.
The challenge is getting both sides right.
Function and emotion.
I think good design should give you both.
Custom doesn’t always mean starting again
Another part of the conversation might be colour, timber, dimensions or the type of mirror glass.
A customer might love one of our existing designs but need it narrower for a particular wall. Someone else might want a timber detail to relate to a dining table or console already in the room. Bronze or smoke mirror might work beautifully in one interior where conventional silver mirror would feel too sharp.
That is one of the advantages of making our designer mirrors here in Melbourne.
We have the ability to look at the individual space and make considered changes when they’re needed.
Custom doesn’t necessarily mean throwing away the original design and starting from a blank sheet of paper.
Sometimes it is simply about changing a dimension, choosing a different timber or finish, or adjusting a detail so the piece belongs in that particular home.
There is a place for a mirror that comes in predetermined sizes and finishes. Not every room needs something custom.
But when the mirror is going to play an important role in the interior, having the ability to make those changes can make all the difference.
For our Melbourne customers, we can also be involved beyond the design itself, including installation when required. For me, that completes the process. We have talked about the space, considered the proportions, made the mirror and then seen it where it was intended to live.
The moment I know we’ve got it right
After all the discussion about size, shape, reflection, colour and placement, there is a point where everything starts to come together.
And it’s usually quite simple.
You stand back and look.
The mirror doesn’t feel like something we have put onto the wall anymore.
It feels as though it belongs there.
Perhaps the room suddenly seems wider. Maybe a dark corner has picked up light. The garden has appeared in a place where you couldn’t see it before. A console that previously looked a little lost now has something anchoring it.
Or perhaps the mirror has become the thing you notice the moment you walk into the room.
That’s when I know we’ve got it right.
After more than 30 years of designing and making furniture and mirrors, I still enjoy that moment.
Because although we may have been talking about millimetres, glass, timber, proportion and placement, ultimately we’re talking about something much less technical.
How somebody feels in their home.
And that brings me back to the question I started with.
“We were thinking of putting a mirror here. What do you think?”
Before I answer, I’ll probably look around the room.
I’ll look at the light.
I’ll look at the furniture.
I’ll turn around and see what’s opposite us.
And then I’ll probably ask:
“What do you want the mirror to do?”
Because once we know that, we can start designing the answer.