Lifestyle

Lived-in Moments

A hand reaching for the last olive at a table that’s just getting started. Two people caught mid-laugh over breakfast, neither looking at the camera. A drink arriving at exactly the moment conversation needs it to. What makes any of this lifestyle? Not the table, not the room, not the drink. It’s the people in it, genuinely caught up in a place or a moment, using it the way it’s meant to be used rather than posing next to it.

Most of this work lives in restaurants and hotels, though the same idea holds for any brand that wants its product or space shown as something people actually live inside, not just something they’re told to want. The look changes with the brief, sometimes editorial, sometimes closer to a straight ad, and casting goes either way too: my studio handpicks the talent when that’s part of the job, or works with the actors and models the client or agency brings in. Either way, wardrobe and styling get worked through together, and each scene gets built the way you’d build a scene for a film that has to look unrehearsed: what’s already on the table, where the light falls at that hour, what’s about to happen next.

None of it is candid, but none of it should read as staged either. The space carries as much of the story as the people in it, so I’m after the feeling of a place, not an inventory of what’s in it. What comes out of it is built to make someone want to be in the room, at the table, inside the moment, whether that ends in a booking, a sale, or simply someone deciding this is the kind of place, or the kind of brand, they want in their life.

Selected clients: Corinthia Hotels · Radisson Blu Resort · Verdi Hotels · Hard Rock Hotel Malta · Tatel Malta