About

I’m Karla, an interior designer with a slightly unconventional route into design. I have a PhD in Life Sciences and, before studying interiors in Sydney, spent more than a decade working across science, technology and innovation, with a career that took me from Zagreb to Vienna, Oxford and a brief stop in NYC before eventually settling in Sydney. Living and working across different countries has shaped the way I look at spaces: as things that are cultural, emotional and constantly changing.

My previous life trained me to question, research and solve problems. Design gives me somewhere more visual, and more colourful, to put that thinking.

I’m drawn to strong concepts, unexpected colour, expressive materiality and spaces with a point of view. My interests tend to wander across architecture, art, fashion, objects, science and technology, and I like when some of that cross-pollination finds its way into a project.

For me, the most interesting design starts with an idea rather than an aesthetic. I enjoy the early, slightly messy part of the process: researching, questioning, testing, making connections and finding the concept that can hold a project together. From there, material, colour, form and detail have something to respond to.

I see my future in concept-led interiors—projects where critical thinking and imagination are given equal weight, and where the finished space still carries traces of the thinking that made it.