In 2002, designer Rachel Basha-Franklin decided to up sticks from her native Australia and move thousands of miles across the world to London. It was a
daring choice that turned out to be hugely rewarding – just five years later she was able to establish her eponymous design practice, which has since masterminded some of the capital’s most exceptional work spaces.

A dream of Rachel's is to connect the best of what people have at home or in a hotel to their office so that they feel valued and actually want to come into work as its an opportunity to turn people’s everyday life into an elevated experience.

Myo provides a mix of casual and formal work settings that overlook the immense St Paul’s cathedral and its bustling surrounding streets – a starkly different landscape to what Basha-Franklin grew up with, having spent her childhood in a country town a few hours' drive south of Sydney.

She fed her early interest in spatial design by pouring over copies of Vogue Living magazine and taking trips into the city with her family. Whilst there they’d visit restaurants and cultural landmarks like the Jørn Utzon-designed Sydney Opera House – offering a connection to another world.

After studying Interior Design at University of Technology Sydney, where her professors were former architects and had an interdisciplinary slant to their teaching, which informed Rachel’s design approach at large. She set off for London ready for change and started her design journey.

Rachel secured a position on the interiors team of practice, Llewellyn Davies Yeang. Here she contributed to the design of several offices, as well as major healthcare spaces like Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Driven by a desire to broaden her expertise in both architecture and interior design, she founded Basha-Franklin Design Studio, evolving it into the tightly knit collective of designers and architects it is today.

25 Hanover Square is where we display both sides working together, our inside:out ethos, on a seven storey building occupying a prime corner plot in London's affluent Mayfair. Basha-Franklin team has plans to introduce a new façade crafted from limestone and pre-patinated Corten steel, its reddish hue referencing the brick colour of the area’s historic townhouses.

Winding throughout the building will be a dazzling staircase with a molten metal balustrade, which Basha-Franklin says will “look like a piece of jewellery”.

Paying attention to detail is integral at Basha-Franklin, “There’s a lot of reasoning as to how and why we do things. It's not just ‘we like that’ or ‘we have a feeling for this’, it's embedded in something that's strategic,”. “We're really conscious that we're [on a project] to the end. We want to choose the cushions, arrange the plants and make sure that when the client takes it on, it's done to the best it can be.”

Basha-Franklin also emphasises that completing projects to a high standard requires time, a resource she thinks is increasingly being mishandled because of artificial intelligence’s growing presence in the design process.

“I come from a time when designing was much slower and about working with pen and paper; every line on the page was more permanent and considered,” she explains.

“The technological change that I’ve seen in my career has been pretty phenomenal and we've now got a lot of tools to help us, but we've got to slow down to make sure that the quality is right…not just keep building as much as we can, as fast as we can.”