In this interview, Marie Cudennec, co‑founder of Sustainable Goldfinger Design, recounts a formative childhood memory of a floating refrigerator in Hong Kong’s harbour, which sparked her awareness of waste and the ocean’s pollution. She weaves a narrative linking the Brutalist architect Ernő Goldfinger—whose name inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond villain—to the studio’s ethos of turning overlooked material into “gold.” Cudennec explains how Goldfinger Design works with reclaimed wood and donated sustainable materials, emphasizing the dramatic carbon‑emission savings of reusing wood versus sourcing virgin timber. The conversation moves to the studio’s community‑focused Goldfinger Kitchen, a monthly free‑meal event built from surplus market food, and how the program pivoted during COVID‑19 into a weekly meal‑delivery service for vulnerable, low‑income residents. Throughout, she stresses a circular‑economy mindset: waste is merely a resource in the wrong hands, and every small action contributes to a larger ecological system. The interview ends with a Dalai Lama quote underscoring the power of even the tiniest contributions.
Chapters
Living in Hong Kong, which as you all know is a very polluted city and where the problem of waste is so in your face, and I remember this moment being, yeah, just about 8 or so, very young, and being on a boat and crossing the harbour and noticing there was a fridge floating in the ocean. And the boat actually had to sort of manoeuvre to avoid the fridge and actually all this onslaught of sort of household appliances that had been thrown into the ocean. And it was such a, you can just imagine, you know, the image of this, this fridge bobbing up and down and quite how a man-made problem this was. It was so obvious to me, even as that 8-year-old, we are trashing our oceans. We are destroying our planet. And it was so clearly a man-made problem. I thought, well, there must be a solution that we can come up with as well. And the architect of the building that we are located in, the Trellick Tower, was called Ernő Goldfinger. So he was a Hungarian-born architect who became, after his death, very famous for this very iconic Brutalist style. It's this giant 31-story, very Brutalist concrete block, and it's very, very love or hate. A lot of people really despise it because it's so big, it's so sort of concrete. Before he built this tower, he actually used to live in Hampstead. He built a house very similar to that in Hampstead, very beautiful tree-lined streets, Victorian houses. And the neighbors were just completely devastated that he'd made this concrete block house. And one of these neighbors was actually Ian Fleming, who already had a bit of a thing, you know, in it for this Arno Goldfinger. They were not the best of friends. They used to play in the same golf club. They had a lot of similar friends. And so Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, decided to call the baddie in his book Goldfinger. He thought that was really fitting revenge. That's so funny, I didn't know that. Yeah, and this is all a true story, it was recounted in one of his biographies, and Goldfinger tried to take him to court. In the end, they ended up settling, and the settlement was a signed copy of the book. There's so much symbolism there in terms of, you know, transforming. So we say, you know, the material we touch, we turn to gold, and it's very much, you know, for us it's about seeing the potential in what others overlook. And so both in terms of the materials we work with, as well as, so, you know, we're working with recycled wood, sustainable materials that are being donated, and as well with sort of overlooked talent as well. So people who may have not been given a chance in mainstream education or who didn't fit into the academic mold, but who are brilliant makers and creatives. And so we also have a platform for people to really, you bring out their potential in these different ways. Waste is a man-made concept. That's just a label that we've applied to it in the very linear model of use, dispose, and that's it. Whereas if you look at nature, waste doesn't exist. It's a cycle. And so this is where the idea of the circular economy comes from. You know, you put something in the ground and it comes back up as something else. You know, nothing should have one life and just go down it. The chain. So I like to say that waste is just a resource in the wrong hands. Oh, wow. I love that. Hasn't found its way to the right hands. There is always a value in something. It's just that sadly, it's often cheaper to dispose of something than to find a new home for it. With climate action, we use as much reclaimed material as possible instead of using virgin material. And there is a much, much lower carbon emission basically for reusing reclaimed wood. We're using 1 ton of wood emits about 38 kilos of CO2 compared to 312 kilos per ton of wood from virgin origins. And we also save emissions from, you know, that it would cost to process the waste in landfill as well, because that's not even taking that into account. Our Goldfinger kitchen, we call our people's kitchen, was a monthly community feast, basically where we invited the local community to come and have a free meal. And we would cook it from surplus food that we would collect from local markets. So you can see the theme running through. It's all about seeing the potential and material that others are not valuing for whatever reason. And we would cook this lovely meal, and about 50 or 60 people would come, and we would all sit around this big table. We would turn the restaurant into one giant table that everyone would sit— like the big Italian family. Exactly, exactly that. And, you know, sometimes some live musicians, you know, donate their time and all of that. And so really lovely. Most of the attendees are very much low-income, slightly elderly people. And so COVID hit last year and we had to cancel, obviously, realizing we can't put these elderly people at risk. But very quickly on, we realized that actually this service, which at the time was a meal, so it was food, but it was also social. And we knew that a lot of the people came because of the social contact, because of the meeting their neighbors. A lot of them live alone, and it was their one meal, their one fun event of the month where they got a restaurant-quality meal, and everybody was just communing over this food. And we realized, before we knew about all the social isolation and how difficult it was actually going to be, that this was actually a really vital service that we needed to keep going somehow. But we were like, how? And so We decided to pivot it to become a meal delivery service that we would go and do socially distanced drop-offs. Firstly, I identify all the people who used to come and get people to refer people who were basically in that vulnerable category. And so we ended up increasing our meal list to between 150 to 200 people every single Sunday as well, not just once a month. It's just about doing the best you can, just taking some action, however little. It doesn't matter, you know, and start seeing it as your part in this greater ecosystem. We're all connected and just do a little bit. No one is too small to make a difference. And I love that Dalai Lama quote. If you've ever spent a night with a mosquito, you will know that.
