- 02Foreword
- 03Interview
- 04SaySanaa Projects
- 05Essay
- 06Artify
Foreword
How does trust arise in a space?
In the second issue we talk about responsibility. From the decisions behind Matrix Salon to the conversation with Orgil — the same single idea runs through each piece in this issue.
Odki · SaySanaa | Black Notions
Interview
M. Orgil
"In other businesses the product stays the same. At ours, every job is new."
Director of Operations at SaySanaa LLC.
She joined SaySanaa in the early years of the company and has since been responsible for the operational management of projects — from client engagement to on-site coordination and delivery.
She believes that the quality of a project is determined not only by the design solution but by how well the process behind it is managed. She writes regularly on project management, organisational culture and the interior design industry.
How did you come to lead SaySanaa's operations?
At first I tried to understand the field from a business perspective. But the more I understood how design works, the more I saw that management is something beyond numbers and timelines. It turned out that without knowing how a design solution comes about — why it looks the way it does — you cannot relate properly either to clients or to the team.
What makes running an interior design company different from other businesses?
In other businesses the product stays the same. At ours, every job is new. Different client, different space, different solution. So while the process can be standardised, you have to constantly feel what is happening inside it. A template approach shows up quickly here.
What do you pay most attention to in project management?
Time. In interior design work, if one thing falls behind, everything that follows falls behind with it. Fit-out, lighting, furniture are all interconnected, so if you don't monitor the intermediate stages, the final deadline loses its meaning.
How do you manage client communication?
The client knows their space best. Without understanding their daily life and habits, the design ends up just a pretty drawing. We place great value on the time we spend talking with them — that time turns out to be the best investment.
What direction will SaySanaa develop in?
We are trying to create spaces at the level of feeling. We see that technology, materials and people's needs are all changing. The goal is to keep pace with that change and create spaces for our clients that remain genuinely useful over a long time.
A standardised process and a unique result are not opposites — they are what a systematic company builds.
SaySanaa Projects
It all began with how to welcome.
The client at Matrix Salon wanted to transform their space. But they didn't know exactly how. At the first meeting we asked not about walls or furniture, but who enters and how, who waits and where, where the light comes from throughout the day.
The answers to those questions became the design.
Movement and Light
Welcome, wait, be served — each of these three moments has its own space. Arranged so that even together, the boundary between them is felt.
Natural light reveals the space differently in the morning, afternoon and evening. Using natural light became a solution with a significant saving on additional lighting.
Fewer elements, more feeling
For Matrix Salon we arrived at the design through a process of subtraction. The more unnecessary elements you add, the space doesn't fill up — it gets noisy. Every element that remains has a specific reason.
Essay
A systematic company looks different
Quality, affordable, fast — many places promise all three.
But knowing where that promise begins to break is what matters.
A systematic company looks different
How a place works is the quickest thing you notice — before you even look at the price.
Recently, interior design brands and addresses have multiplied enormously. Almost all have rendered images, a "professional team," "affordable prices," "fast delivery." Differences are rare to see.
Yet look closely at where exactly those promises collapse. Once the work begins, "something came up," "materials haven't arrived," "nobody mentioned that" — these are the words you learn to recognise. At that point it becomes clear why the price was so low.
Some places, however, work differently. They don't make many promises, but from the very first interaction they stand apart from the rest. They give clear answers when asked. They state risks in advance. Rather than saying "we'll see" when a mid-process problem arises, they have a mechanism to resolve it.
A firm with permanent staff, an office, and regular tax payments is not hard to identify. The level of detail in a price proposal, the precision of the contract, and how they respond when asked a question — these are the quickest things to notice.
The money and time spent fixing work done cheaply often turn out to be no less than what it would have cost in the first place. Interior design happens once. That decision stays with you for many years.
Artify
The man hidden in the stone
Michelangelo once said: "I took the man out of the stone. I simply removed what wasn't needed." This sounds almost like a joke, but looking at David, something about it feels entirely credible.
When this statue first stood in Florence's Piazza della Signoria in the summer of 1504, the city stopped. Contemporary accounts record that "people gathered in great numbers and stood in silence."
What is David
Michelangelo Buonarroti was twenty-six years old when he accepted this commission. Three years and four months, alone. The material was white marble brought from Carrara in Tuscany. The height is 5.17 metres; the weight including the plinth is approximately 5,660 kilograms.
The client was the Florentine Opera del Duomo, and the original plan was to place the statue on the roof of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. But once finished it proved so extraordinary that in 1504 it was brought instead to the Piazza della Signoria. After standing there for 369 years it was moved in 1873 to the Galleria dell'Accademia for preservation.
The subject is the biblical contest of David and Goliath. But Michelangelo depicted not the moment of victory after the fight, but the moment before — David in the few seconds in which he has already decided and is poised to throw.
Seven things no one tells you
People generally know surprisingly few things about the world's most famous statue.
Two sculptors tried this block of marble before Michelangelo. In 1464 Agostino di Duccio began and abandoned it; in 1476 Antonio Rossellino attempted it and failed. Both assessed the marble as "damaged and unusable." The stone lay untouched for twenty-five years before the twenty-six-year-old Michelangelo made his most celebrated work from it.
The head and hands are proportionally larger than the rest of the body. This is because the statue was originally intended to be seen from a great height above ground. Seen from below, the effect of perspective makes the larger head and hands appear correctly proportioned.
Michelangelo carved the pupils of the eyes in the shape of a heart. In the Renaissance this was considered a means of conveying the spiritus — the living soul.
Researchers comparing the anatomy of David's body with any real person's have noted one curious detail: the physical response to pre-combat stress appears to have been calculated with precision. Michelangelo did not read anatomy books — he was a man who had studied cadavers firsthand.
Moving the statue to the square in 1504 took forty men four days. Fourteen wooden carts were laid beneath it and it was eased forward slowly. Florentine records note that during those days people came out into the streets across the city to watch.
In 1991, a man named Pietro Cannata entered the museum and struck one of the toes with a hammer. The fragments revealed the repair material to be plaster — showing the museum had carried out prior restorations unknown to the public.
Full-scale replicas stand in three locations: the Piazza della Signoria, the Piazzale Michelangelo, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Most tourists who visit the square believe they have seen the original. The original is inside the museum.
What happens when a statue stands in a square
When David first stood in the Piazza della Signoria in the summer of 1504, the space changed. To say that people saw the square just as before would be wrong. Something stopped them — and that is what matters.
When something of this force stands in a public space, the city lives. Art exists not to look beautiful but to stop a person.
SaySanaa's Ukhamsar sculpture stands before the UN building for exactly this reason. It was not an idea about filling a space.
How trust arises in a space — a person simply feels it.
ARTIFY