Sol Elements: The Gold Coast Hinterland Bathhouse Redefining Rest | ABI Interiors

How you doing guys, my name is Russ Raven. And I'm Shea Raven and welcome to Sol Elements Barkhouse. The inspiration behind Sol was Japanese architecture. We fell in love with the yakusugi, which is the burnt Japanese wood, which is one of the oldest traditions, I think it's 600 years old. When we found the yakusugi, that was like the base, which made everything just stand out from the Italian tiles to all the ABI products. The fact that we're on a lake with the submersed fire pit, we really wanted to make it so that you could sit as close to eye level as possible with the turtles and the fish and the ducks and all the birds. In the end, it was honestly just nature having, okay, yes, the burnt black wood, but then the antique bronze that we've used from ABI, but then obviously all the really beautiful red wood that we found. Having incredible collaborators like ABI Interiors and the Lighting Collective to really, I guess, just bounce off and be like, hey, what do you think about this? And obviously everything we did, we wanted to be a little bit more moody and rustic and earthy. So the question of what makes Soul Elements so unique, it's easy to build a building, I say that after the fact, but the difficulty is making it have a life or a heart. And that's kind of what Shea created, along with our therapist and our team to actually give it the blood that pumps around. And that's one of the most beautiful things about creating a space like this, is that you're creating a space that people really, especially because it's no phones, so that opportunity to come and just completely unplug, forced to unplug for that 90 minutes, I think, yeah, people don't realise how much they needed that until you see them floating out. The fact that the building is circular, leans itself to that figure eight, the infinity of just always moving. And that comes to the centre of it, which is the yin and yang. And we built that because in any great relationship, any strong relationship and partnership, there is a yin and there is a yang. So we built that as a reminder that every relationship and partnership needs both sides of the coin, the black and the white, you know, the light and the dark.