Nothing Left to Take Away: The Architecture of AJCD

“Perfection is not achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Stain-Exupéry.

Perfection is not achieved when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Or so it was thought by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the famous writer and aviator who disappeared somewhere over the Mediterranean in 1944, flying a reconnaissance mission for the Free French Air Force. And so passed a man who lived in fierce love with his homeland, and with art, literature and love itself, forever unafraid of limits and always passionate for success.

For in all walks of life, there are those who commit to their work and strive to master it with the passing of time. But then there are those lucky few who are born to create, whose drive and passion and preternatural mastery of their craft set them aside from all others and bear them to incredible feats, those few like Ara Salomone and her team of creatives at AJCD who pass their days melding the new with the old, creating tangible history in which we live our lives.

Stable Hands Coffee is one such accomplishment, a Fremantle café occupying a Heritage-listed building that once supplied wine and spirits during WA’s gold rush era. Now, it offers ethically sourced coffee and a menu constructed from indigenous Australian produce that pays homage to those that walked this land long into the past.

And within its raw surfaces, framed by its distinction of colour, no edge untouched and no detail overlooked,  Ara’s work holds intact the history etched into every surface and aperture, and creates as much from the stories that have shaped the building as the very wood and stone itself.

For that is what AJCD does so masterfully that sets the Perth firm’s work apart. For them, and for those others that see the past as they chase their future, what has come before matters as much as what has yet come to pass. If you look carefully around the city of Perth, you’ll see here and there someplace new imbued with the reverence of the past, like Stable Hands Coffee, Emerald Store, and the Brooklyn Barber. And standing inside any such place, one cannot deny the Frenchman’s philosophy.

Perhaps it is a love of tradition, or the great sense of value found in restoring, rebuilding and keeping alive the ways of the past that drives us to strip back what it is that we do until it is bare and raw and perfect and gilded by time, until it too must pass into yesterday.

For like the great French writer himself, all things will eventually disappear over that horizon and it is left for us to let them grow old only in our minds, and in what we create in their memory.