“In 2017, Dino’s yiayia sadly lost her home to a fire,” explains Sara Horstmann, founder and co-director of Das Studio.
“It was a surreal day for a number of reasons: it was 11 November – Remembrance Day – and that spring we had those particularly bad storms in South Australia,” adds co-director Dino Vrynios. “It was unseasonably hot when the storm front came through. The heat and wind fanned the fire through the house very quickly, before golf ball-sized pieces of hail fell from the sky.”
Out of this disaster of biblical proportions, the pair saw an opportunity arise from the ashes. Vrynios was put in charge of assisting his grandmother in managing her affairs, while he and Horstmann also entertained the idea of helping the family to do something with the land.
“This couldn’t just be a project that we did on the side because it was too big,” says Horstmann. Like many great and fervorous decisions, the choice to start their own practice was made over a bottle of saké at a Sydney restaurant. At the time Horstmann was working as an interior designer at Studio Nine Architects, while registered architect Vrynios had several gigs
