A press practice based in Byron Bay. Quiet noise, well made.
What we make a habit of. A short list, kept honest — we do these things, not other things.
On a quiet stretch of the Gold Coast, a developer's curlicued balustrades drove a young architect to refuse his own building. Seventy years later, the woman who saved it from the bulldozer chose not to undo a single one of them.
This block of flats was designed, the story goes, by Harry Seidler. Not the Seidler of Australia Square or the MLC Centre or Blues Point Tower or any of the buildings that turned a Vienna-born modernist into the great architectural provocateur of postwar Australia, but the young Seidler. The Seidler in his thirties, recently returned from working in the offices of Marcel Breuer in New York and Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil, building a practice in Sydney and accepting the occasional commission outside it.
Currumbin in 1958 or thereabouts was not yet the Gold Coast that the rest of Australia knows. It was a fishing village with a pandanus-lined beach and a few weatherboard cottages, set behind a headland against which one of the cleanest right-hand point breaks in the country wraps and wraps. Whoever the developer was — history is patchy on the detail — had ambitions to build something for the modern age, and he hired the right architect for it.
And then, the lore continues, he ignored him. The developer wanted the curly balustrades. Seidler did not. Seidler, by every account of the man written in the sixty years since, was incapable of being ignored on aesthetic matters. The story passed down in the Currumbin community is that he refused to allow his name to be attached to the completed building. He walked. And the building got built anyway, by someone else, balustrades and all.
Whether the story is true in every particular is, in a way, beside the point. What is true is what you can see.
The building is unmistakably of its period. The horizontal proportions, the cantilever, the unornamented planarity, the white planar walls. The whole thing, but for those curlicued iron balustrades, looks as if it has been drawn with a single confident horizontal line.
Seventy years on, the flats at 796 Pacific Parade are rising again. Not as something else; as itself. Alana McBain, who held planning rights for a five-storey demolition and rebuild, decided to build one extra storey instead — a new top-floor penthouse threaded onto the original through an independent concrete frame engineered by Richard Erwin that bears no load on the 1958 fabric below. The original building remains. The balustrades remain. The architect, presumably, would still walk away.
Inside, the interiors are by Milah Laidley, who is, in the way these stories sometimes resolve, the McBain–Cannon daughter. Her paintings — sold elsewhere under the single name MILAH — hang on the walls she has dressed. Three apartments below, a penthouse above, four keys in all. The ground floor stays with Ela Elu, the bridal atelier Alana founded and still runs, where her sister Narelle works the front-of-house and where, on a Saturday in 1958, the developer who didn't listen to Harry Seidler might once have walked past on his way down to the surf.
Four modern-Mediterranean villas on Bingin Hill, made for the long stay. Issue No 01 piece The long view. — on the architecture, the host, and the case for the considered stay — is now published.
A 106-room surf-and-wellness resort at Keramas, on Bali's east coast, opened 2012. Issue No 01 piece The long ride. — on fifteen years of surf and wellness maturing into a longevity practice, and the new wing being built to do more of it — is now published.
The clifftop beach club at Uluwatu, run by Josh Forrow. Issue No 01 piece The Englishman of the Bukit. — on Josh's twelve-year project to build a hospitality empire on the southern cliffs of Bali, and what happens when the boy from Bingin marries the girl from New York — is now published.
A made-to-measure bridal atelier on Pacific Parade, founded 2018. Issue No 01 piece Eighteen weeks. — on the slow making of a made-to-measure wedding dress — is now published.
Justin Werner's luxury charter operation, working out of Bali across the Nusa islands, the Gilis, and as far west as Krakatoa. MV Samkara and the wider fleet. Issue No 01 piece By accident. — on how the operation began on the way to a toilet at Hotel Komune — is now published.
Troy Sinclair's clifftop resort on Nusa Lembongan, and the Kai Koa — the thirteen-metre boat that takes surfers to the breaks the world has not yet found. Issue No 01 piece The waterman. — on the Australian who became Indonesian, built a hotel, and runs one of the great charter boats in the islands — is now published.
A four-key boutique on Pacific Parade, restored rather than demolished. Currently in placement for a long-form feature with Vogue Living.
A Bali hospitality group with a particular eye for design and the quiet end of the trade. A long-form piece is in production on the founders and the way the rooms are made.
An eco-resort with a marina on South Stradbroke Island, under a 100-year Crown lease. The kind of project measured in decades.
Press placed across Tony Cannon's portfolio since 2003 — from the Bale resorts of the mid-2000s through to Hotel Komune today. Each entry runs in the publication shown; bylines are the writer's, links go to the live piece.
A complete portfolio document is available on request — thirty-nine pages spanning 2003 to 2026, every entry sourced with a live URL, every byline named where credited.
We work with fewer houses, more closely. A short roster, a long relationship, and a habit of answering the phone.
Albe* is a small house by design. The roster is short and stays short — eight subjects at any one time, no more — and we work with each closely. The founders and houses we represent are people we know, mostly personally, working in fields we know — hospitality, surf, fashion, marine. We are not pitching for new business. The list grows when a piece in production becomes a piece in placement, and when an editor we trust says yes.
The work is editorial first. We think about what a piece of press will read like in three years, not what it will look like in three days. We write longer briefs than most. We send shorter pitches than most. We commission rather than represent, and the writer's byline always carries the relationship to the editor.
The thirty-year operating history behind the practice is Tony Cannon's. The twenty-three years of placed coverage — beginning with the Bale resorts in the mid-2000s and continuing through Hotel Komune today — is the work that produced this practice. Albe* is the name we have now put on it.