Alyce Tran just tickled pink with her Woollahra terrace

A terrace in Woollahra filled designer Alyce Tran’s every need to be in the city.

Alyce Tran says her home provides a good example of what can be achieved with small spaces on a tiny budget. Picture: Adam Yip

From the moment you step inside, it’s easy to see the parallels between Alyce Tran’s cute eastern Sydney home and her popular personalised accessory brand, The Daily Edited (TDE).

Not only is the compact Woollahra terrace well designed with a modern edge, it features a soothing palette of pinks and greys that mirrors the calming aesthetic of TDE’s range of leather and lifestyle goods.

But the co-founder of TDE is quick to point out that the connection extends beyond the visual, with her stylish two-bedroom home also providing a good example of what can be achieved with small spaces on a small budget.

“I quite like that, because I stand for budget with TDE and In The Round House (Tran’s new tabletop homeware collection), both being quite accessible brands,” the 35-year-old says.

Ever a businesswoman, the former lawyer says it was the price point that first attracted her to the Woollahra house in 2014, the same year she launched the TDE leather accessory collection with co-founder, friend and fellow lawyer Tania Liu.

“I wanted to live in Darlinghurst because that would have been a walk into the city where I was still working as a lawyer, but I couldn’t quite afford it,” Tran explains. “I saw this on the way to Paddington and thought maybe it would be in my price bracket because it’s small.”

But while the price got Tran through the door, it was the modern renovation by acclaimed architect Iain Halliday that sold her on the house, which sits near Centennial Park in one of Sydney’s most prestigious suburbs.

Tran says she was drawn to the home’s interesting features and solid feel as well as the fact that it’s wider than most small terraces.

Alyce Tran's backyard at her home in Woollahra. Picture: Adam Yip

While the home is only 100sq m, Halliday’s clever refurbishment has created separate lounge and dining areas with a fireplace downstairs as well as a modern kitchen opening to a leafy courtyard. Upstairs, under the high-pitched roof, are two double bedrooms and a large pale grey marble bathroom, filled with light from well-placed skylights.

The terrace also has some excellent storage space, which proved very handy in the early days of TDE when the company’s inventory was stocked at Tran’s home. What started with a simple collection of three leather items — a card holder, a compendium and a pouch — marketed solely through Instagram, quickly grew into a multimillion-dollar business, with Tran leaving her legal job to focus on TDE in 2015.

The start-up success story now offers 1200 items ranging from key rings to carry-on luggage — all able to be customised with monograms — and employs 80 people across three stores in New York, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as seven concession outlets in David Jones stores and its online sales division.

The rapid expansion of TDE and the establishment of In the Round House in 2018 has kept Tran on the move, although the COVID-19 pandemic has seen her spending less time in the TDE office during the past year and more time working from her marble-topped dining table.

It’s a shift she’s enjoyed, particularly given her home’s proximity to Woollahra’s popular Queen Street shopping precinct.

“I love how Queen Street is just 100m away. It means that I can just run down and get a coffee. I actually don’t ever do a full grocery shop — I get everything from Maloneys (the local grocer) as I need it,” Tran says.

White Sabitine shoeboxes and TDE handbags. In the early days of her company, the house doubled as warehouse. Picture: Adam Yip

Since buying the house, Tran has renovated the kitchen, exchanging its stainless steel bench tops for pale grey marble counters, and installed black steel framed glass doors that open onto the courtyard, which she’s also refurbished.

In the living area, a row of pink glass pendants leads to pink velvet armchairs, all from Jardan, while the walls are home to pink-hued artwork including images by photographers Bart Celestino and Derek Henderson and a painting by Melbourne artist Catherine Hiller.

A collection of Tran’s monogrammed TDE handbags sits at the ready in the lounge room.

Upstairs, mirrored built-in wardrobes are filled with designer clothes, while a stand of 40 chic white Sagitine shoeboxes reveals a passion for expensive footwear.

Tran grins as she admits she’s doubled the stand’s capacity by stacking each box with two pairs of shoes.

“It’s all Bottega, it’s all Chanel. I’m like that Sex in the City character: ‘I don’t have anything, I just have the shoes’,” she laughs.

Designer shoe desires aside, Tran is contemplating her next steps in real estate and has begun the search for a home with more space. “I’d love to have a view, but again, it’s about budget restraints,” she says, smiling. “Maybe one day — it’s something that I’d like to work towards, absolutely.”