Saori & Matt from Idealogue

About
creating a space to work and to share
— at
Nightingale Studios
,
Wurru wurru biik
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Tell us about yourselves:

MATT: My name is Matt. Saori and I have been running Idealogue since 2014. We are a small digital product design studio. We work mostly with startups but we’ve done all kinds of interesting projects over the years. 

SAORI: I’m Saori, and this is Rin. She’s a staffy and she’s the boss.

How did Idealogue come to be at Nightingale Studios?

MATT: We zig zagged around the inner north for a while. We had a studio in Clifton Hill. We moved into the Moran & Cato building in Fitzroy (next door to Naked for Satan). It was really beautiful, but it had wooden floors with no insulation whatsoever. We could hear everything. Then we moved to the Urban Coup building in Nightingale Village. It was great too, but we wanted to be off the main road. We didn’t want to be looking out at traffic, which is hard to come by in Brunswick! We bought the space off the plan. We were drawn to the window looking into the central courtyard and being up a level looking out to something more interesting than cars.

SAORI: We love the high ceiling, and the beautiful window. The size is perfect.

Who did the fit out?

MATT: We had a good idea of the fit out process from our previous spaces. An architect friend of mine, Matt Ellis, helped with planning and we sourced nearly everything locally. Woodbeast did the joinery. All the fun stuff is in the details like the secret coffee drawer which contains a perfect place for all the coffee stuff.  Like us, they’re massive nerds, so it was really fun working with them on solutions for the space. The sofa has built-in charging stations but is also so comfy, you can have a sleep. Solstice did the lights and we worked with an incredible electrician named Fynn from Power Please on a custom control panel for the lighting and fans. We also had a lot of fun designing all the conduits complementing the exposed services. Hugh McCarthy designed our our beautiful desks.

There’s a beautiful sense of space in here.

MATT: The idea was to have fewer desks and as much clear space as possible because we offer community yoga classes (which we did for a while at Skye House). The space here is largely open. We have yoga mats and blocks stored within the joinery. 

SAORI: Some of the residents from upstairs have been coming to class.

MATT: We’ve also offered the space to the residents to run some of their community meetings if they need it. It’s the nice thing about working within a community.  

SAORI: The space is also available for dog play when it’s too hot for the park. For Rin and her mates.

MATT: We really love the community aspect of the building. We don’t want to shut ourselves away. We’d rather be involved in the building and let the residents know the space is available to share. We want it to feel more like a home than an office. 

How do you get to work?

MATT: We don’t drive, but we’re lucky - we live just across the street from here.

SAORI:  We can see the studio from our balcony.  Handy if you want to check that you turned the lights off.

Got a favourite lunch spot?

SAORI: Good Days banh mi.

MATT: Ramen Shouyuya just opened on Sydney Road - it only opened two days ago and it’s really good.

SAORI: Madonna Electric for pizza.

Find out more about
Nightingale Studios
and
Wurru wurru biik
.
First published in
January 2025