We learn by making — and let the material ask the question.

Design built on curiosity. That is not a positioning statement. It is a description of how we actually work — and how we have always worked, from the very beginning.

It began with soap. Not with a business plan or a design brief or a material specification. With soap, and a want to do something with our hands. Chelsea started making it during the 2021 lockdown — drawn not by the product itself but by the process, by the particular satisfaction of understanding a material well enough to shape it into something useful. That instinct — to learn by making, to let the material ask the question — has not changed. It has just grown more demanding.

The soap gave way to candle holders. The candle holders gave way to coasters, soap dishes, trays — a homeware range that emerged not from a concept but from an accumulating material knowledge. Each object was an answer that opened another question. What does this material want to be? How does a surface resolve? What does a form need, and what can it do without?

Chelsea taught herself everything — casting, moulding, finishing, and eventually 3D design, which she began learning just two years ago. Everything else was learned at the bench, through iteration and failure and the slow building of a craft that has no shortcut.

Andrew was there from the start — working elsewhere while the studio found its form, sanding pieces between lunch breaks, present in the way that matters most when someone is building something from nothing. He joined full time in 2024, bringing a BCom degree, an engineering intelligence, and the structural rigour that turns a well-made object into a sustainable body of work.

Alkaline is now a small, close-knit family studio. Chelsea’s mother Rose works full time alongside us, and Bongi, who has been with the studio for four years, continues to grow as we do. We work from the Old Mushroom Farm in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal — a place with its own material character, heavy and grounded, that finds its way into everything we make.

The shift from homeware to something larger came through WAYST.

WAYST — pronounced “waste” — began as a question we could not stop asking. What if demolition sites were not endpoints but supply chains? What if the rubble left behind after a building comes down — the brick dust, the terrazzo offcuts, the ceramic fragments — carried enough material memory to become something worth keeping? We spent eighteen months finding out. Crushing, casting, shaping and finishing construction debris sourced from local demolition and waste streams across KwaZulu-Natal into objects that retain the visible traces of their origin.

What WAYST gave us beyond the objects was a change in the scale of our thinking. If this material logic could hold in a pendant, could it hold in a lamp? In a table? For the first time we are working at furniture scale, which is the direct result of a studio that spent years learning how materials behave at small scale, and is now asking what they can hold at a larger one.

We are still learning. We expect we always will be. That is not a limitation — it is the condition that keeps the work honest.

Design built on curiosity. The curiosity hasn’t stopped.