Adele Winteridge and her team at Foolscap Studio are making our bar and café culture a whole lot more quirky and fun, writes Collette Swindells.

When you start out in life training to be an Olympic gymnast, it is pretty easy to understand how a strong work ethic and eye for detail will become defining features of whatever else you are involved in.

And so it follows that Adele Winteridge – founder of Melbourne’s rising boutique design firm Foolscap Studio – ended up studying interior design at Curtin University in Perth, starting her career in commercial and retail design, before moving interstate to teach at the Whitehouse Institute in Sydney.

It was here that she went on to lead the Design programme, writing its degree curriculum in her early twenties, while pursuing freelance design projects on the side.

She then went on to help found lobby group Raise the Bar – who were intent on evolving the bar culture landscape in New South Wales through relaxation of the drinking laws – finally finding her design niche in concept-driven projects that often challenge or push the status quo.

 

 

The Doghouse by Foolscap Studio

“When I first moved to Sydney, I had a real interest in developing the cultural side of the city because there was nowhere that I really wanted to go out to,” she says.

“I just wanted to go to better places, and I wanted to be involved in designing these spaces.”

Working in collaboration with several other designers, Adele launched one of the first small bars to make use of changes to the NSW Liquor Act (2007) – the Commons, in Darlinghurst, Sydney – which won the Time Out Sydney Bar Awards Small Bar of the Year award in 2010, and has not looked back since.

 

The Commons

Since then, she has relocated to Melbourne, established her practice Foolscap Studio, and taken on a range of interesting projects including Collingwood’s coffee-stop-under-the-stairs Tiny Café, and Sydney rooftop bar sensation (constructed in just 24 days) The Doghouse.

 

Tiny Café

And it seems the best is yet to come, with a future collaboration already happening with Pieces of Eight jewellery specialists and Nonda Katsalidis.

Foolscap Studio
foolscapstudio.com.au