Andrew Parr’s St Kilda home is a celebration of 70s glamour
Interior designer Andrew Parr talks ‘ugly design’, living authentically and the tragic circumstances which brought about his most personal – and powerful – project yet.
In Melbourne’s beach-side St Kilda, where resident bohemians suffer the seasonal tide of backpackers and palm-fringed boulevards dotted with opulent terraces tell of a boom-time retreat for the Victorian era’s elite, designer Andrew Parr declares himself “at home”.
It’s a statement of both residential location and neighbourhood love by the 50-something founder and managing director of SJB Interiors (Melbourne), who for more than three decades has been tapped by the country’s corporate titans to imbue their homes, head offices and branded hustles with an elevated presence. As its patron, Parr gives good design and “always” gets invited back for a party – in a nod to both smooth process and its celebratory outcome.
It’s a happy reciprocity that reads into SJB’s recent refurbishment of The Royce, an Art Deco-inflected hotel in leafy Melbourne, named after and nuanced by the architecture’s 1920s origins as a Rolls Royce showroom. Parr played to its jazz-age beginnings, streamlining the 94-room establishment with a velvet-pile, post-war modernism suggesting that the past is roaring into the present.
“Think of the parallels between then and now,” he says, citing a global pandemic, the surge of new technologies, an equity boom pushing to the edge of a precipice, geopolitical unrest, women rallying for equality, and the rise of the far right. “It all makes a rational case for a reprisal of the 1920s,” he says – history rhyming rather than repeating, as Mark Twain put it.
Parr delivers this wisdom on a cold Melbourne morning from the warmth of his kitchen parlour, a sequence of cooking, dining and living spaces at the rear of a Renaissance-revival residence built in the 1870s after the carve-up of a storied 1850s estate. The heart-of-house zone, pulsing with glazed primary colours and modernist furnishings from Cassina’s 1970s catalogue, overlooks, and opens to, an indoor pool propped with a “shagadelic” daydream of stag ferns, disco balls and mirrors.
“Groovy baby”, in the Austin Powers idiom. Parr, attired in a suited slouch of Ralph Lauren, speaks of amplifying the aesthetic of the former owner’s 1970s renovation without pandering to the spirit-killing pretences of Pinterest. Why replace the kitchen when a lick of liquorice-green paint over existing brown ’70s cabinetwork and a fresh laying of stone makes for a service area that is right now and resourceful, he asks. The question cuts to the quick of “peak stuff”, one of the hard asks of contemporary design that Parr’s continuing willingness to work through garnered the gold medal at the 2019 Interior Design Excellence Awards (IDEA).
“I mean, what’s with the need to layer four different marbles and fill every wall with joinery? And why am I seeing all the red and green marble that I’ve ripped out of schemes for the past 20 years returning?” he remonstrates, with eye-rolling allusion to the recent proliferation of Memphis Group tributes by young designers “who know nothing about the socio-economic context” that shaped the 1970s postmodern critique. “Do you mean Memphis the music?” he continues, in a shock-mock repeat of one young designer’s recent inquiry. “What the hell are they teaching them in the academies? I had a full library drilled into my head at RMIT by Uta White – a European with a clipped accent and deep critical thinking. ‘If you are going to select this thing, then know where it came from,’ she would say.”
But it’s one thing to moan about the “endemic” ignorance of precedent and another to redress it, as Parr does by regularly mentoring design students from his alma mater. “It’s a myth that we are now exposed to more and better. Algorithms conspire to constrict originality. I’m glad I had that tough arts-based learning and I feel compelled to pass it on.”
He recalls bouncing White’s critical rigour into SJB after graduating from RMIT’s Interior Design School in 1987 and fleshing the firm’s offering into a multi-discipline holism that added the interiors “icing” to the structural cake. But after five years in a corporate nest feathered by founding architects Alan Synman, Charles Justin and Michael Bialek, Parr says he felt ready to spread his wings and, though not ready to fly the coop, founded the autonomous interiors division in 1994.
The value his “atmospheres” added to the allied SJB architecture saw Parr and his longtime co-director, designer Ljiljana Gazevic, quickly expand into hospitality, most notably contributing to the hybrid assemblage of hedonistic interiors in Melbourne’s Crown Casino and Sydney’s Establishment Hotel. They actualised “the experiential” long before the phrase was coined, evolving it into such artful “headspace” as The Fantauzzo Hotel Brisbane (now the Crystalbrook Vincent), named after Melbourne artist Vincent Fantauzzo, whose everywhere portraits bear silent witness to guest stays.
Of the difference between the respective cities, Parr – who has just wedged his team of 18 into a new open-span warehouse in the retail heart of Richmond – believes Melbourne deliberates more over design and indulges in a bookish quirk, whereas Sydney “has more of a party mentality and loves a look without interrogating it”.
Regarding his own style, he eschews labels and instead talks “personality” – preferring to manifest the character and collective memories inherent in a person and place. “It’s about abstracting you in artefact and architectural line, not me,” he says of a profession predisposed to writing its signature large. “I worry that the individual is being styled out of their individuality right now.”
Currently fielding hospitality projects from Geneva to Germany – where he has designed 15 hotels for the TOGA Group – Parr is most excited about the redesign of a Toorak home for a high-flying business family whose request for something “singularly special” will result in a bathing space inspired by a ceramic-lined room in the Royal Palace of Madrid. “We’re doing massive sheets of basalt custom-glazed to insinuate Japanese crackle,” Parr says of matching “Villa Necchi heavy” architecture to a weighty one-of-a-kind concept. “Now that’s super luxury to me. Letting the building tell you what to do and crafting a response.”
Architecture’s subliminal instructions are evident in Parr’s own house, which clearly demanded a party. The designer laughs and dishes stories on the local demimonde and celebrity DJs dancing the night away on an illuminated glass dance floor purpose-built over the pool. “We’ve had some full-on people and parties here and the house just seems to absorb it,” he says. “I like action and living authentically.”
He harks back to the house of his mum and dad – “a very sociable pharmacist and an engineer”, whose conviviality he sought to capture in a style of architecture never mooted as an option – “Dutch gables, a turret and a flat façade skewing German”. But Parr, a committed modernist who had already made his home an homage to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in another St Kilda street, remembers the life-changing circumstance that kicked him out of his typically stark comfort zone.
“It’s what happens when you’re busy making plans,” says Parr, talking of his long-term partner Stacey Pavlou suffering the unexpected death of his brother in 2019 and of “stepping up” to offer to care for Pavlou’s niece. “Suddenly we had inherited 13-year-old Anastasia and were changing a lot of things very quickly, starting with our accommodation. We became that version of Modern Family [fathers]” – a couple of gays playing hapless dads to a girl.
Parr recalls casting wide for a house with personality and more room to play than their then Prahran residence afforded. “A friend informed me that this one was coming up for auction at a time when banking policies were tightening and buyers were going to ground. We got it for well under the reserve and moved in around September 2019, doing some quick work to make it liveable. I’m still nibbling away.”
He continues the narrative with a walk-and-talk through evanescent rooms filled with archly contemporary art, winking juxtapositions and object memories. Formal front rooms described as a “honky honky” glitz of 1970s safari with their mix of Pierre Paulin seating with Pierre Cardin lamps, African statuary, Gio Ponti chairs, and the decorative bombast of a glass-topped dining table by Tibor Hubay. Every piece is a conduit to a story and a statement on the suburban frisson; a special climate of encounters between “more artists per square metre than Manhattan”, alternative bands, academia, boutique hotels, queers, Jewish cake shops, the judiciary and sex workers.
“It’s sleaze and commercial ease, your typical ghetto made into something groovier by minorities,” he says, justifying the entry hall’s hang of an Adam Cullen painting depicting a French prostitute balancing on “the porcelain” against a colour field of sunny yellow. Cullen’s distinctive drippy grunge – “a fitting Montmartre allusion to this part of Melbourne” – echoes the bordello-bold zebra carpet climbing the stairs and a foyer-end glow of golden marble in a mausoleum-like powder room that takes Parr’s storytelling on a detour to Greece.
“Just before settling on the house in 2019,” he says, “we headed to Mykonos, where Stacey had organised his 50th birthday party – 50 guests boating to a big rock concealing a restaurant and a celebrant ready to turn the event into a surprise wedding. One crazy extraordinary experience.” It could have climaxed in a catastrophic turn-down but Parr issues a resounding “Yes, I said yes! All the stars just magically aligned … and then they imploded.”
He remembers returning from Mykonos and moving into the house as Melbourne slid into the world’s longest covid lockdown, which offered scant reprieve for a Friday night dinner party. “I recall Stacey getting up from the table and being gone for too long. I found him dead on the floor of this bathroom … a massive heart attack. That was three years ago.”
The subsequent weight of grief bearing down from the walls of that room was too much, says Parr of ripping out all the fixtures and remodelling it as a sepulchre of Golden Spider, an expressively veined stone coincidentally sourcing from the Greek Cypriot region of Pavlou’s family origins. “The room now glows in reminder of him.”
On cue, Anastasia, now 17 and studying photography, bounces through the front door, filling Parr in on an “all-nighter shoot” and sharing her view on the surrounding ferment of sacred, profane and WTF. “I’ve never been so creatively motivated by a house,” she says of rooms that have changed her consciousness and hoped-for career. “So many different environments and ideas.”
Parr beams with paternal pride and says that too many people live in fear of self-actualising in a space. “You gotta be honest and do design ugly if it’s got a philosophical reason to exist,” he says of celebrating the human condition. “Better strength of character than the superficial cop out.”
This story appears in the October issue of Wish Magazine, out now.
