In Residence with

Bec Snelling

We visit the home of Bec Snelling, where art, design and daily life exist in quiet conversation.

PHOTOGRAPHY:  Katie Begbie

Bec Snelling's studio is housed within her home, a historic Villa in Mt Eden. It functions almost like the home's quiet engine.

It was here that we met Bec and watched her work: dreaming, creating, designing. Each movement was unhurried but exact, the manner of someone who understands every part of her craft and her business in equal measure. Pinned to her vision board was the View Collection, the next chapter of a collection she released last year. It was a fitting glimpse into how she works. Nothing arrives fully formed. Everything is returned to, reconsidered and refined.

Snelling is a multidisciplinary studio based in Aotearoa New Zealand, working across lighting, furniture, sculpture and material led object collections. It was established in 2007 as a collaboration between father and daughter Douglas and Bec Snelling. The practice is now led by Bec.

Shaped by her formal training in fine art and more than two decades of design practice, the studio's work sits between sculptural form and functional object. Its collections are grounded in material research, developed through both traditional craft methods and advanced manufacturing.

The pieces are designed and produced in New Zealand alongside a specialised team of makers and fabricators. Snelling's works are intended as pieces of art, built to endure. Through years of continual refinement, the studio has evolved through the process of making itself, learning by doing and staying committed to the pursuit of better.

To spend an afternoon with Snelling is to watch both halves of the practice at once, the dreaming and the doing, as ideas are given form through disciplined, deliberate craftsmanship.

Explore Snelling Studio
You made the decision to move your studio into your home. A former living room now holds an installation of your work, and a formal dining room has been transformed into your studio space. Has living amongst the objects you create changed the way you work, or what you feel creatively drawn to?

It didn’t begin entirely as an intentional decision. I was doing my master’s study and needed somewhere to work without bringing that inevitable mayhem into our working studio. I had the space at home, so I set up there. I certainly have reservations about work being at home, as I can struggle with boundaries.

When we launched the second part of the Hour Collection, I couldn’t find a commercial space that spoke clearly of my intention. We renovated the two large downstairs rooms for the exhibition, and the heritage nature of the home really worked with the collection. 

Since then, I’ve retained it as a very personal arm of the studio, a space for my own process. However, next year we plan to bring all of Snelling under one roof. It will be incredible for us to be operating in one purposeful space, particularly as we enter our twentieth year.

The Sandringham rug anchors the exhibition space. How did you see it working with your pieces, and what did it bring to the room?

I selected it based on the muted acidic burnham tone. It works incredibly well with our Snelling palette. We tend to remain close to our materiality, our timbers and tones. I knew it would speak to the works through both contrast and complement. It gives the room a tonal foundation.

Talk us through a typical creative day. You’ve said mornings are when you do your best thinking. Where does an idea usually start, and how does it move from cut-outs and paintings on the wall to something you can hold?

Mornings are usually when I have the clearest space to think. Drawing and painting are always my anchors, the processors of ideas, allowing expansive thought. Then Snelling acts as a filter and resolver.

I make a lot of paper models because they are quick and immediate. Moving a drawing into three dimensions helps me understand proportion, scale and how something might be made. From there, the work moves into prototyping with our makers, and the material itself begins to inform the decisions.

"Walking is a daily discipline, and I like to walk up the mountains, particularly now that I live in the city. I mention this as I have come to rely on it in my process. I like to get to the factory and wider studio most days too. I am very hands-on in the business, so each day can be quite variable depending on whether we are in production, preparing for a launch, or developing new work."
How have the practices you inherited from working alongside your father, Douglas, shaped the way you lead the studio today?

Dad has an insatiable work ethic and this “make it happen” mentality. I love asking him about an idea and watching him mull it over. Sometimes there is a certain resistance, but then my phone will go a bit later and he’ll say, “I’ve been thinking about that idea.” And we will always attempt it.

He is also the fastest at getting prototypes made, and we work really rapidly once we are rolling. This pace can be fantastic because it allows us to spend more time in the refinement phase.

He’s taught me to be a doer, to get on with it and figure things out as we go. He is much less of an overthinker than I am, and I think that has been very good for me and for the studio.

You trained in fine art before moving into design practice spanning two decades. How does that background come through in the way you approach a functional object?

My work is still approached from a fine-art mindset, in that I articulate ideas, emotions or my experiences through objects and artefacts. Sometimes it can feel as though the work just happens to take the form of a functional light or table, and that’s where it enters into the language of design.

I have become much more comfortable occupying that space between the two disciplines. I now recognise it as an asset, and I tend to make the work I feel drawn to make.

The View Collection continues a body of work you started last year. What draws you back to a collection, and how do you know when it’s ready to evolve further?

I always knew the first three pieces were an “aperitif”, as such, for a wider exploration of these ideas. It’s a beautiful body of work that has a minimalist–maximalist tension. It’s quiet and still has gravity.

I love the ambivalence within it, and the developing of typology and materiality across the collection.

I tend to return to a collection when its language still has room to develop. It is similar to the previously mentioned Lens in a way, as it’s an expansive collection for the studio, as opposed to Hour, which felt more conclusive.

Light, mirrors, metal and reflective surfaces run through so much of your work. What first drew you to them, and what keeps you coming back?

Many things bring me to this. I grew up in a colonial farming home, and there was a great deal of inherited silver, candlesticks and serving pieces.

Mum and Granny always had dressing tables and grooming sets. I adored the romanticised feminine ritual of brushing their hair or getting ready for an event. And then, conversely, I love the cleanness and minimalism of these materials. They can hold a strong formal presence while responding continually to light and their surroundings.

Lights, well, I’ve been making them since my undergraduate days, out of light bulbs and extension cords. I have just always gravitated to light and shadow, silhouettes and strong material surfaces.

Is there one piece you’ve most enjoyed designing? The Lens Collection seems to hold a special place for you. What’s the story behind it?

The Lens Collection came after our factory had been heartbreakingly destroyed by a fire. I had been working tirelessly and exhaustively, in a way that I had really departed from what was most dear to me.

Lens was about seeing through a new lens. I made a decision to make work that was much more true to my voice. It was a bold move for us, as the studio really did still depend on commercial viability.

It was a leap of faith, and one that I look back at and think, thank you. Although it didn’t fly immediately, it steered us and opened up a different and important direction for the studio.

Very few designers still manufacture in New Zealand. How do you keep a craft so hands-on and local while growing a global business at the same time?

It isn’t easy. We have a very good team who are dedicated, smart and hardworking. Just this year we have brought on three new team members, and it takes a certain tenacity.

Keeping production here gives us more control over the quality and allows us to remain very hands-on. There is a particular set of restraints that comes with manufacturing in New Zealand, but we have found that working within those restraints actually pushes the work further. In a way, the limitation becomes part of the solution.

The work brings together the knowledge, relationships and stories of my wider ecosystem, alongside my own. I think that is also part of how we grow internationally. In a world oversaturated with noise, making here in New Zealand enriches the work and gives our practice a distinct voice.

Your studio moves between traditional craft methods and advanced manufacturing. Tell us about some of the craftspeople you work with. What do they each specialise in?

We have many special people that we work with, probably too many to mention. Our shade makers in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Helen and Doris, have been making shades for forty-five years. They are absolute perfectionists, and I am particularly grateful for their contribution to the View Collection.

Matthew, our spinning expert, has been working in his field for forty-plus years, and I met him when I first started in 2007. John, our dyer, works from his home in southern Tāmaki Makaurau and hand-batch-dyes our fabrics. Our finisher Malcolm is something of a legend in his field.

Bec's Rug

Sandringham in Fog