Veil House
VICELLO’s early collaboration with HA Design Group on this Sydney home shows why treating a joinery maker as a design partner protects the vision through to completion.
Veil House, a residence in Strathfield, Sydney – designed by HA Design Group and built by Mirage Developments – brought joinery specialist VICELLO into the project from its earliest design stages. For the company’s founder and creative director Victoria Pirrello, that timing shapes what a joinery studio can contribute. “A seat at the table means sharing the thinking and the accountability from the start,” she says. “It’s about contributing to the design conversation while decisions are still open and when challenges can be addressed before they become constraints.”
By working alongside HA Design Group through the design phase, VICELLO was able to contribute to materiality, detailing and the resolution of junctions before construction even began. “Every project naturally evolves through documentation and construction,” Pirrello explains. “The benefit of engaging us early is that we can help guide those inevitable refinements in a way that protects the original design intent, ensuring the outcome is practical, functional and beautifully executed.
“We work in service of the design,” she continues. “Our role is to carry a vision through to completion intact, resolving the detail so that what was imagined is what gets built.” On Veil House, that meant developing the joinery in step with the architecture, with finishes, hardware and detailing considered alongside the building’s structure.
In the kitchen, dark timber veneer cabinetry runs floor to ceiling, framing a stone benchtop and concealing appliances behind flush panelling for a continuous run of joinery. Dressing rooms use the same restrained language, with slim black hardware set against pale, flat-panel doors that recede into the wall plane. In the bathroom, matte plaster walls meet a freestanding tub and brushed-brass tapware, a pairing resolved early enough that services and waterproofing were designed into the build from the beginning. Each of these moments depended on decisions made before the drawings were finalised, when VICELLO could still shape how a junction, a reveal or a handle would sit.
Pirrello frames this way of working as one of shared accountability between designer and maker. “For an interior designer or architect, this is the difference between a maker who delivers your drawings and a maker who delivers your reputation,” she says. VICELLO’s authority sits alongside that of the design team, with both parties answerable to the same outcome.
For HA Design Group, the approach kept its design intentions intact from drawing through to the final product. For VICELLO, Veil House confirms a working method the studio applies broadly: engage early, stay accountable to the same result as the designer, and let the build itself carry that intent through.
