'Right now it's greys and silvers ... nickel, zinc, pewter,” says Kris Torma. “Brass and copper go in and out of favour – they always come back. But bronze … well, bronze is forever.”
Torma and his brother know a little about trends. Back in 1995, their company, Axolotl, pioneered a technique for applying semi-precious metals to any surface, any size, any shape.
Because it is real metal, but only 0.5mm thick, an Axolotl surface can be polished, etched, combined with other materials and aged in days, not decades. Although it looks grand, it's relatively cost-effective.
So it allows you to bestow the gravitas of Renaissance bronze on ordinary garage doors, or wrap a standard kitchen in the warm lustre of copper. The applications are immense, from trophies to whole buildings, and the company has won more than 40 awards for its work over its 25 years.
Axolotl grew out of a part-time picture framing business the Tormas had while working in other fields – Kris in cinematography and Kim in horticulture. Through trial and error they invented a way to achieve a metal look and feel on frames before testing their technique on entrance doors.
“People didn't do metal doors before us,” says Kris, chatting in Axolotl's office-showroom-factory in a southern Sydney industrial park. “They were too heavy, too hard to work with, too expensive.”
Axolotl still does 100 doors a year, ranging in price from $5000 to $60,000 plus, depending on size and complexity.
“This one,” he says, pointing to a handsome specimen, “was 3D-printed then bronze-coated, polished and aged. That one next to it was sandblasted first, then coated in aluminium.”
Hundreds of metal samples are displayed around the room like album covers in racks and on shelves. Some differences are obvious – colours from light to dark, textures rough to mirror-smooth. Others are incredibly subtle: there are, for example, 40 shades of rust.
“Actually,” says Kris, “it's infinite.”
There are screens cut in Florence Broadhurst patterns and a stunning black marble coffee table incised with gleaming brass penstrokes. It's by Spanish creative Jamie Hayon, one of the artists Axolotl paired up with for last year's Easel Project (co-ordinated by Australian designers Adam Cornish and Marcus Piper).
Downstairs on the factory floor are more examples of Axolotl ingenuity: a scale model of a historic building that will become a touch-map for the blind; tubes of water inserted into lolly-coloured glass; a Mondrian-inspired glass door with graphite outlines awaiting colour panels.
Sydney’s CBD contains a fair representation of Axolotl's work, from the glossy interiors of the Paspaley store and the lobby of the Westin hotel to the refurbished bronze doors, elevators and teller counters of Westpac's old headquarters. For Melbourne's Tiffany store, Axolotl reimagined the brand’s famous wheat leaf motif in silver, embedding it in jewel-like starphire glass.
The Tormas' interest is in transforming materials, says Kris, “re-engineering them to take on new properties ... lighter in weight, more flexible in form, or stronger than the original”.
Architecture firm Woods Bagot approached the brothers to see if they could make a terracotta façade for a project they were undertaking in Wollongong, the Nan Tien Institute. To make it out of solid ceramic would weaken the structure and add enormous weight. Axolotl found a way to apply a terracotta surface to aluminium blades, resulting in an earthy, surprising and sophisticated finish.
“We love nothing more than a brief that has no available solution, so we can create one,” Kris says.
Artist Jade Oakley is also at the factory, having a word with one of the designers (there are 25 employees on site as well as Kris' dog and an office cat named Beatnik).
Oakley came to Axolotl in 2017, with an ambitious idea for a memorial wall at Harbord RSL Club: six giant copper poppies to float over a reflecting pool of water with a 35 square metre bronze wall behind, perforated by a sea of tiny lights. Oh, and the poppies needed to sway in the breeze.
From Oakley's “little maquette made of cardboard and sticky tape”, Axolotl worked out the engineering specifications and co-ordinated the trades and processes involved in the installation.
It's more than technical support that Axolotl offers Oakley. “I love bouncing ideas off people, and this place is one of my favourite trampolines,” she says.
Coming up for Axolotl – if it gets the go-ahead – are 25 shopfronts in 25 materials for Norman Foster's Sydney Place project in the CBD. There will be more art, more experiments, more new materials. There will be trips, eventually, to the factories they have in the UK, Hong Kong, China, India and the US.
A blend of creative thinking and business management differentiates Axolotl from its competitors, and Kris says it springs in part from their upbringing.
“Our father was a sculptor and photographer and our mother was a ceramicist. We went to a Steiner school and many of our school friends went on to work in creative industries.
“Being entrepreneurial is probably also a family thing, as our father always worked in his own photographic business and we never saw ourselves in traditional desk jobs working for someone else.”
For Kris, constant innovation is not just a core part of the business, but stimulates the brothers to keep going. “We’re still developing new surfaces and designs on a regular basis, which is an incredibly creative outlet,” he says.
“It’s been quite an exciting ride.”