Interviews with Salome Gulordava

Design is the act of carrying a person's inner world out into physical reality and giving it visual form. A space, in that sense, is never just walls and furniture, it is a kind of translation

Residential homes, showrooms, and cafés are where the interest sits most naturally, spaces where atmosphere and daily use meet directly, and where the design has to hold up under ordinary, repeated living rather than a single dramatic impression.

The first project completed for a company was a showroom, a useful early lesson in designing for both a brand's identity and a constant flow of visitors.

Marble. Its weight and its coolness immediately shift the character of a room, and no two slabs read exactly the same way once light hits them.

Traveling brings that on more than anything else, particularly time spent in museums and exhibitions, both contemporary and historic. There's something about standing in front of work built in a completely different context that resets how a space or an object might be approached.

Detail, lighting, and ergonomics come first, in that order of attention if not importance. A space can look right in a photograph and still fail the person living in it if these three aren't resolved together.

It's closest to a feeling of fullness, an idea builds until there's an almost urgent need to sit down and get it onto paper or onto a screen before it loses shape.

An individual character that couldn't be copied onto another project, paired with correct lighting and the right orientation of the space relative to the cardinal directions. Get the light and the orientation wrong, and no amount of styling afterward fully compensates.

Whether the concept itself is fully resolved, whether the lighting is right, and whether texture and color are working together rather than competing. Everything else follows from those three.

A designer's responsibility goes beyond the brief itself. Material choices, energy use, and how long a space lasts all have consequences, so sustainability should be part of the design from the start, not added on afterward.

Design is moving toward a closer bond between technical performance and aesthetics. Energy efficiency and material choices are now part of the creative process from the beginning, not adjustments made at the end. At the same time, craftsmanship and locally made elements are becoming more valued, even as tools like 3D modeling make it easier to test ideas early. The future likely sits between these two things: precise technical execution and human, handmade character.

Home is Georgia, in Tbilisi, a country with one of the richest and most distinctive cultural and architectural legacies in the region, shaped over centuries by its position at the crossroads of different worlds. Growing up surrounded by that depth of history, stone churches, ancient wine culture, a design language all its own, it becomes almost impossible not to create something that carries some trace of that character. That heritage shows up in the work less as direct reference and more as an instinct: a respect for material honesty, for craftsmanship, and for building things meant to last. Designing in a fast-growing city like Tbilisi also brings its own creative energy, encouraging fresh solutions for light, privacy, and a genuine connection to nature.

The process begins with getting to know both the space and its owner, understanding not just the dimensions of a room but who's actually going to live in it. From there, work on the concept turns into a fully live, evolving process, ideas get tested, revised, and sometimes abandoned entirely, as paths and options slowly open up along the way toward the final goal. It's rarely a straight line, sketches and material samples tend to redirect the concept as often as they confirm it, and that back and forth is really where the design takes its final shape.

Lamps, sinks, mirrors, sconces, and rugs, the kind of pieces that seem small on a floor plan but end up doing the most work in how a room actually feels day to day.

Weeks are deliberately split across different kinds of days, some spent entirely at the computer, others visiting showrooms, and others on site at active projects. Keeping these separated avoids losing time to unnecessary back and forth travel and keeps productivity steady across the week rather than scattered.

Learn to listen before designing anything, the strongest concepts usually come from understanding a client's actual life, not from a personal style imposed onto their space. And don't rush the process, the best ideas tend to arrive after several rounds of revision, not in the first sketch.

The reward is seeing an idea move from a sketch to a space someone actually lives in and enjoys every day. The harder part is that a project's timeline rarely depends on the designer alone, construction delays and sourcing issues can stretch out a process that was, on paper, planned much tighter.

The rule is to remain, on every project, an interior designer, someone who builds a concept and a coherent design around the client's and the space's needs and priorities, never ჯუსტ a visualizer who transfers a client's own ideas onto a screen without adding anything of real design thinking.

Technical knowledge comes first, understanding exactly how each design decision will actually be built and executed, not just how it looks in a drawing. Close attention to detail matters just as much, since it's usually the details that decide whether a finished space feels resolved or not.

Almost always some version of: what does it cost to renovate a single square meter?

Working on the design of my own home turned out to be the most important experience so far, there's no client to defer to, so every decision has to be justified on its own terms, which sharpened a lot of instincts that carry over into every project since.

mail:sally@gulordava.com
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Lime-wash walls, micro-cement floors, African wood furniture the material choices in Desert Dream were made with a fairly specific goal: to quiet a home down. Together, these surfaces cut the visual clutter that tends to build up indoors and replace it with something more tactile, closer to the calm of an actual oasis. The sand tones do the work of settling the eye, while the warmth of the wood offsets the coolness of the concrete walls and marble elsewhere in the house. It's a deliberate pairing of natural materials meant to function less as decoration and more as a counterweight to city life a home built to be a retreat from it.

Solar panels were built into Desert Dream from early on, part of a broader push toward energy independence that runs alongside the project's design ambitions. It's a choice that fits a wider shift happening across residential architecture in Georgia and the region treating sustainability not as an afterthought bolted onto a finished design, but as something worked into the structure itself. The result is a house that holds its own technically while never losing sight of what it was built to feel like, proof that resource-conscious systems and strong design don't have to compete with each other.

The idea of a desert oasis shaped nearly every decision behind Desert Dream a search for balance between vast, quiet space and pockets of life within it. The seven-meter ceiling carries the openness of a desert directly into the home, while greenery scattered through the interior works against that scale, softening the stone and marble with something living. Sliding glass walls remove the hard edge between inside and outside, letting light move through freely and keeping the sense that this house is its own contained world still, but not sterile.

Building Desert Dream meant solving problems that don't come up often a custom vaulted concrete structure, glass panels manufactured individually rather than pulled from a standard line. Soundproofing turned out to be the hardest piece: even with bespoke glazing, getting it fully quiet against the city outside wasn't achievable. That limitation pushed the design to lean harder on what was already there the height of the ceiling, the texture of the materials to create a sense of separation that didn't depend on blocking out every sound. In the end, it's a reminder that a restorative home isn't only about isolation from the city; it's about getting the balance of light, proportion, and material right enough that the mind settles anyway.

Work on Desert Dream started with a close study of the Lisi Lake area, one of Tbilisi's better known recreational zones, valued for its city views and relaxed pace. From there, the design moved from an abstract concept into an actual spatial language through three dimensional modeling, which made a fully open floor plan possible. One of the more important decisions along the way was to drop traditional partitions in favor of low walls and decorative elements, so that natural light could reach even the furthest corners of the residence. The layout was planned so that electric lighting simply wasn't needed during the day, an approach that puts the natural rhythm of the environment ahead of artificial solutions.

The ideas tested in Desert Dream, especially the pairing of precise technical execution with local craftsmanship, will carry into future work from the practice. The project shows what residential interiors gain when local professionals are brought in early, in this case for the custom marble elements and bespoke fixtures made to match the design identity. Going forward, the practice plans to look more closely at how technical infrastructure and aesthetics work together, with facade insulation and energy efficient double glazing as areas of particular interest. The way Desert Dream blurs the line between its interior and the Lisi Lake landscape has raised broader questions about site specific architecture and its potential as a restorative tool for people living in cities.

One part of Desert Dream that deserves more attention is the way botanical choices and technical sustainability features work together to support the home's restorative aim. The architecture itself operates at a large scale, but the banana trees and cacti placed throughout act as a living continuation of the desert oasis idea, chosen specifically for how well they handle the light filled, seven meter volume. Soundproofing materials and facade insulation also play a role here, working alongside the visual openness rather than against it. And the fact that the layout allows the home to run almost entirely without artificial lighting during the day is a practical result that ties the aesthetic of the residence to real, lasting values around resource use.

African wood was chosen for the custom furniture mainly for practical reasons, its durability and low moisture content mean the pieces hold their shape over time without warping. But the material does more than perform well. Its density makes it possible to carve and etch landscape patterns directly into the surfaces, turning the furniture into a kind of quiet storytelling device within the interior. Set against a palette of stone and lime wash, the wood brings a grounded, organic warmth that offsets the cooler feel of concrete and micro cement. It reflects a broader approach to materials, one where longevity and the ability to carry a narrative through skilled craftsmanship matter as much as appearance, connecting a material from far away to a very specific local context.

The sensory contrasts in Desert Dream come from an open plan structure where low walls mark out zones without blocking the flow of natural light. As daylight shifts across the day, it changes how the warm stone and cool micro cement read, and residents move through those shifts almost without noticing. Because every point in the home keeps some visual connection to the landscape outside, the mood of the interior tends to track the mood of the environment around it. For anyone working in design, the project is a reminder that real psychological depth doesn't come from one dramatic gesture, it comes from balancing generous glazing with grounded, natural finishes, so the space works both as a livable modern home and as a sanctuary tuned to the people using it every day.