Welcome to the hotly anticipated follow up, as promised, about how you can afford good, authentic design. This is an all-important sequel to Fake v Real, and will have many sequels and prequels all around it. Much like Star Wars. So anyway. After my compelling argument for Team Real, I feel certain you’ve all understood that Replica is not ok, yeah? Yeah. And for the good reasons that whether or not you’re a specifier or a consumer of design, money is money, value is value, a

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that my job title has more slashes than an episode of Vikings. And over my time I’ve had plenty-a-comment that I should work on that. Pick one. Narrow my focus. Be someone. The old jack-of-all-trades syndrome beware. And then I go and have a little think about people like Alexander Girard. My official most favourite designer. All encompassing of the titles architect, furniture; textile; and interior designer, childrens book author et al. Basic

Real vs Replica. Blah blah blah. But seriously, it’s serious. And designer or design consumer, you are critical to the debate. With all clients (including ones that aren’t even mine) this topic ALWAYS comes up. It also comes up* with family, friends, students and relative strangers. *I repeatedly bring it up. It’s one of the topics I’m pretty convinced about. I’m black and white on this one. And my years on the high school debating team are firmly in action (Welcome, Adjudica

There’s a little train that goes through the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney. It’s for tourism. Tourists can see as much of the harbour as possible and rest their legs while they hear all about the past and present of our great city from the tour guide that’s driving. Train. Tourism. Tour guides. Tick, tick, tick. More ticks than the Northern Beaches so far. So anyway, the little train passes me one day while I was reading in the park. The tour guide was Canadian (irrelevant)