If you’ve ever wandered into the Camperdown store of Deus ex Machina in Sydney, you’ll know that there’s more to it than just motorbikes, with everything from surfboards to bicycles, great food and amazing artwork.
Well, the creative crew behind Deus Sydney have hopped on the plane to Bali and built an amazing Deus compound in the middle of and Indonesian rice field.
The Deus Temple of Enthusiasm includes a retail space, motorcycle store and custom-build workshop, surfboard making facilities, an art gallery and studio and a restaurant.
“The whole idea for Deus is to combine various elements, motorbikes – customising motorbikes – surfing, art, bicycles, and Indonesia is the place where you find all those things happening very enthusiastically,” explains founder Dare Jennings (also the creator of clothing brand Mambo).
“Indonesians, like most third-world countries, fabricate motorbikes continually,” Dare says, “there’s a huge surfing community, with Bali now becoming the centre of surfing in the world, there’s 4 million tourists that go there every year, there are a lot of artists and a whole lot of things that were relevant to what I was trying to achieve with Deus.”
The new Deus store is quite remote, with only houses in the surrounding area but, just 500 metres from the beach, it’s perfectly placed to take advantage of the surf culture, with a good selection of boards made on site.
A spacious courtyard is made for entertainment and – although it’s not an official music venue – the guys from Australian band Wolfmother have already dropped by.
The interiors – by Carby Tuckwell – and buildings echo the local architecture, in fact, they’re made from it. Recycled timber and materials were gathered from the surrounding area and went into the new structures.
“It’s very cost-effective – you can do something quite spectacular there for probably a tenth of what your costs would be anywhere else,” dare says. “It was a chance for us to build a building and have it be exactly what we wanted it to be.”
Dare’s vision for Deus is one of acceptance, that everything is okay, that a surfer need not be just a surfer and a motorbike enthusiast can also be an art lover.
“I’d like to think that we’ve come to the end of this era of mono-cultures and there’s a whole generation of people who just want to participate and enjoy and learn things.”
Deus ex Machina
deus.com.au
To celebrate the opening of their new Bali store Deus ex Machina are
giving habitusliving.com readers the chance to win their beautiful book
as well as a $100 gift voucher to spend at any Deus store.
