Designas research

Our father's drawings of apartments, seen from above, were our first maps. We filled them with little figures from Ludo and ornaments from the Christmas tree. We moved in. We lived there. Our figures had rooms, lives and conversations.

Every year our parents changed the interior of our room together, the way other parents buy new shoes for growing children. Our mother made the curtains and the bedding; our father, endlessly inventive, built new furniture out of the old. And every time we jumped for joy, as if we had moved into a new city, a new house. All our love for interiors comes from those days: from our first games, and from the games around our parents working in our room.

While our father was working in Kazakhstan, our mother found a technical school in Sofia, TDVA, the Technical School of Woodworking and Interior Architecture, and encouraged us to apply. We were admitted after the 7th grade, one year earlier than usual, and studied there for five years, until 1998. Alongside the theory we had real practice. The school had a large workshop with machines and received timber as raw planks; machines laminated the chipboard, and we edge-banded the finished panels by hand. We worked with circular saws, band saws and routers, and we painted and varnished, everything it takes to reach the finished piece, from solid wood through chipboard to furniture, for real clients.

Our interior architecture teacher, Vanya Kostova, an architect, asked us to draw a kitchen in perspective during the summer holiday. When we finished, she looked at it and said there was something in our drawings that would catch a client's eye.

In 1998 we began studying Engineering Design at the University of Forestry in Sofia, where we stayed until 2001.

From the start of 2000 until March 2001 we worked in practice at a renowned furniture company. There we deepened our knowledge of computer programs, design and furniture construction. We became not only designers but also constructors, drawing on what we had learned at the technical school. It is easy to make mistakes when building furniture, but we found a way to make them disappear: back-checking. We took the 3D drawing down to the construction drawings, breaking the boards into individual parts (a door, a plinth and so on), and then we went the other way: from every single part we rebuilt the 3D model. The errors showed up at once. A single millimetre of error means big costs, and a surprising number came to light. At the time, among Sofia's furniture firms, this was a new way of preventing errors. We were 19, and our boss was proud of the innovation. The workers who built the furniture stopped making errors in production.

Through the University of Forestry we joined the Erasmus programme, and from there we set off for the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart, for the summer semester of 2001. On our way there, we stopped in St. Pölten for an interview with Mag. art. Barry John Hewson, head of the New Design Centre at WIFI Niederösterreich. He told us he would be waiting for us in September.

In the winter semester we arrived in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, at the Design Kolleg St. Pölten (Kolleg/Aufbaulehrgang für Design) of the New Design Centre, where we studied until 2004.

A year later, alongside the college, we began the Interior Architecture degree at the St. Pölten branch of Kingston University London. Barry Hewson placed us straight into the second year, and we graduated in 2005 at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

In 2009 we completed our master's studies at the Florence Design Academy.

The plate became a page. The page became a room. The room became a way of looking, and the looking became a practice.