Art In Architecture – Nat Cheshire and Michael Lett in Conversation

Cheshire and Lett have crossed paths professionally on numerous occasions, collaborating on gallery and residential projects and continually exploring the question of how one might live when living with art.

Nat Cheshire and Michael Lett met properly in 2012, at Ponsonby Road’s Bambina Café, for what was to be the first of many conversations about a small cabin. Cheshire went on to become the youngest-ever winner of Home of the Year for their brooding, sculptural twin cabins on the Kaipara Harbour. In the years since, Cheshire and Lett have collaborated on a string of residential and gallery projects, while supporting art projects by Simon Denny, Michael Parekōwhai and Martin Creed. They make and fill homes for each other, and are continually exploring the question of how one might live when living with art. Their exchanges combine design rigour with a curatorial sensibility, shaping spaces that treat artwork as an essential part of everyday life.

Michael Lett is a New Zealand gallerist, collector, and director of Lett Thomas in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), which he founded in 2002. Known for a collaborative and adventurous approach to exhibition-making, he works with practitioners such as Anoushka Akel, Richard Frater, Kate Newby and Zac Langdon‑Pole, helping to shape contemporary Aotearoa art.

Cheshire is a design studio. It crafts small wooden tables, huge city districts, and the places, buildings, homes, bedrooms, objects, smells and experiences in between. Whether creating Britomart or renewing rural wharekai, that work is founded in the humility of revealing the extraordinary, not creating it. With collaborators from Piet Oudolf to Katie Lockhart, their studio of forty pursue this for clients and sites on six continents. Nat Cheshire leads that studio.

Nat Cheshire | Speaker
Michael Lett | Speaker 

Let’s Talk Art presented by Aon, brings together 30 artists, curators, designers, and collectors for 10 compelling talks over three days.

Entry to Let’s Talk Art is on a first come, first serve basis. There is no RSVP.

A valid ticket to the Aotearoa Art Fair 2026 is required for entry to this talk. Buy tickets online.