Hello!
My name is Matt Allison.
I go by many titles with over a decade of experience in the design industry. My work has been featured in various lifestyle publications including Home, House & Leisure, Elle Decoration, VISI, Real Estate, Good Taste & The Sunday Times.
Based in Sydney, Australia my approach to interior styling and design is clean and timeless. I believe in creating spaces that are simple and functional, yet practical enough to deal with the ever-growing demands of daily life.
Thank you for visiting.
Category Archives: Events
Chef’s Harvest
As you may have gathered part of my vocation revolves around food production by way of urban farming, which ties neatly into my love for design.
Currently I manage, service and farm over an acre of arable land across Cape Town’s Southern Suburbs, using front and backyards to grow up food for owners, restaurants and markets.
The arrangements I have with each ‘landlord’ is different, varied and tailored to their needs, but one of the greatest gifts is being able to use a few of the farms to grow up heirloom vegetable varieties for eateries and expanding chefs palates with unique, fresh ingredients.
As I’m quickly moving towards my winter planting season I decided to invite a few local chefs who support me by buying weekly produce to come and share the last of the summer harvest, picking ingredients and then cooking them up together.
On Saturday morning at 9am we met at our Constantia based 400m2 ‘farm’. Coffees in hand we got stuck into picking and harvesting, while guiding them through the various beds.
Present were Trish Kratz from Starlings Cafe, Sonja Edridge from The Larder and Vanessa Marx from Dear Me. Sadly Stefan Marais and Kyle Knight of Societi Brassiere and Societi Bistro were preparing their Brassiere kitchen for us, but joined us post harvest.
Armed with buckets of freshly picked produce we headed off to the brassiere to enjoy a leisurely brunch.
In addition to the vegetables I was armed with some wonderful cold smoked haddock from Ocean Jewels and free-range foraging chickens, butter, eggs and marmalade from Simply Wholesome.
Each chef picked his/her own ingredients and got stuck into preparing their dishes, inspired by the produce on hand.
I even got stuck in with a ‘rustic’ kedgeree, much to the laughter of Societi chef Garth Morton, who while admiring my egg boiling skills gently alerting me to the fact they have an industrial boiler, something this kitchen cook/farmer has NO experience with!
Cumulatively we must have prepared and plated up 15+ dishes before sitting down to tuck into the feast.
Over brunch we spent time discussing ingredients, politics and recipes, while admiring the produce and dishes. At some point we raised the possibility of doing a monthly or quarterly event like this that the public would have access to, a kind of pop-up, what do you think?
It was the first of what I hope will become a regular gathering of like minded chefs, farmers and producers as we continue to foster a sense of culinary community here in Cape Town.
To keep up to date with the comings and goings and to see more pictures visit our new Facebook page.
Simply Pierre Cronje
Last year Neil Stemmet approached me to landscape famed carpenter, Pierre Cronje’s showroom in Wolfe Street, Chelsea Village.
Neil and I share similar views on collaborative creativity and on lifestyle and decor trends. One specific trend is going back to our roots, calling for simpler times and reinvesting ourselves into our homes and kitchens, quite literally bringing the outdoors, indoors.
I had a blank slate to work with and rather than turning the garden into a ‘farm’ I tried to work into the established landscape, we kept the indigenous trees, removed the aliens and then planted around them.
I wanted to share that growing vegetables could be done anywhere and worked into ones existing landscape, lettuces between your shrubs, grandillas along the fence line, tomatoes between the agapanthus etc.
The only gratuitous liberty I took was growing climbing beans and cucumbers up the indigenous acacias trees, which were literally brimming with edible gifts, a sort of summery Christmas tree.
I pulled out the perennial basil lining the window boxes and planted up 20+ varieties of vegetables and herbs, providing an edible feast to both clients and staff alike.
Over the course of 3 months I would do weekly pruning and place the harvest inside the showroom for clients to help themselves to.
All this culminated on Thursday night with the official launch event with Jacques Erasmus from Hemelhuijs cooking up a storm with ingredients I had picked from the garden early in the day with all the decor and styling under Neil’s careful curating.
I was delighted to see that Pierre also picked up a Design Indaba award for his Simply Pierre range, the day before I delivered a Petcha Kutcha talk there on, you guest it, collaborative creativity.