Iain Halliday says some of his past projects would not be achievable now

An instinctive urban sensibility drew Iain Halliday away from his beachside upbringing and into a life in design.

Iain Halliday

My planned interview with Iain Halliday, director of interior design practice BKH, is relocated from his offices on Challis Avenue in Sydney’s Potts Point due to the emergence of the local COVID-19 cluster. Instead, we meet in his satellite office in Sydney’s Palm Beach, situated in a row of modest shopfronts. It doesn’t have the high-design panache of the city premises, which are in an Italianate Victorian terrace complete with snow leopard print carpet (in homage to French decorating doyenne Madeleine Castaing) and a curved, steel-framed screen formed in clear acrylic roof cladding, but it does have ample space and there’s only one other person in the studio. “I come to Palm Beach every Thursday, work here on Friday and go back to the city on Monday,” says Halliday.

He has a second house in the northern beaches enclave, built on sandstone bedrock and overlooking the ocean, not far from where he grew up in Collaroy and Bilgola.

A beaches boy of the 1960s, Halliday was less interested in surf culture and looked to more urban stimuli, and his passion for the glamour of New York hasn’t waned; even in the current climate, he knows it is where he feels most himself.

Darley Street Thai in Sydney’s Darlinghurst

“As a small boy of five, I knew the make and model, the grille size and the badge design of every car. Obsessions have always driven me,” he admits. His mother, Beth Halliday, who worked in an architect’s office in an administrative capacity, loved nothing better than a weekend trip to the latest project home, and her son tagged along.

He also has a photographic memory for certain images and vividly recalls one mid-1970s cover of Vogue Living: “It was a project home by Pettit and Sevitt that had apple green walls and was really very clever.”

Still passionate about print as a medium, Halliday has vast collections of magazines and books in every office and home he owns (Sydney, Palm Beach, New York), and laments the lack of interest some of his younger staff have in using anything other than the internet as a research tool. “I mentioned the French designer Christian Liaigre to a colleague, and despite the fact that he walked past a huge glossy book on his work every day it was to the web he turned to find out more.”

ne of Halliday’s career highlights is a book on the practice’s work published by Thames & Hudson in 2008 (and still available), featuring more than 60 projects to mark 20 years of work across residential, retail, commercial and hospitality projects. Words are by Antonia Williams, David Clark and Catherine Martin. The cover, however, is image only – no title or text – and the two objects from Halliday’s own home, a graphic work by New Zealand artist Julian Dashper and a Victorian-era stag’s head chair bought in a Paris flea market, illustrate why he is the high priest of luxe-minimalism.

Mosman residential project

Design editor Jean Wright, a longstanding collaborator, draws an analogy with French fashion designer Yves Sant Laurent, who could conceive the spare, androgynous silhouette of the Le Smoking tuxedo for women and in the next breath produce the rich, layered exoticism of his Ballets Russes collection. Halliday, she feels, has the same creative breadth.

This came in part from his education and early training via an interior design degree at Sydney’s COFA and a period studying architecture at UTS. He spent 18 months working in the offices of high-profile Sydney practice Marsh Freedman, where he learnt an enormous amount from Neville Marsh, who looked after the interior side of the business.

“For all the opulence in many of Marsh Freedman’s designs,” says John Engelen of furniture retailer dedece, “it was always balanced with tempered restraint guided by Modernist principles.” At its core that is the philosophy of Halliday, even today.

With the encouragement of David Katon, his design tutor at UTS, Halliday joined Neil Burley Design, a precursor to what eventually became BKH (Neil Burley, David Katon and Iain Halliday).

Residential project in Sydney's Mosman

“It started as an industrial and graphic design practice that then morphed into a graphic design/interiors practice when David Katon became a partner in the late 1980s,” says Halliday. “People used to say that we got all the best work, but the reality was we made it the best. Even on a small project, we would take one big idea, a succinct gesture, and throw money at that aspect rather than spread it around evenly.”

This was especially effective in hospitality spaces, such as chef David Thompson’s ground-breaking Darley Street Thai in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, with its lobby of gold leaf and theatrical wall of high-gloss pink lacquer, and the reworking of the iconic restaurant The Summit in Australia Square tower, designed by Harry Seidler in 1967. “We decided to enhance the experience by getting rid of all the superfluous clutter, and then set up a limited palette of colours and materials, with classic Knoll chairs,” says Halliday. Not only was it a commercial success but a call came from Mr Seidler to compliment them on a job well done.

Summit Restaurant revamp

Thirty-four years after joining the practice, Halliday is the last man standing, with Neil Burley departing in the mid-1990s and David Katon in 2010. “There were a few tough years, with the New York office opening and the recession hitting simultaneously”, he says. But Halliday has always had staunchly loyal clients, such as Elizabeth Jones, who has worked with him for 25 years across a wide range of project types.

“He has designed retail spaces, a residential beachfront rebuild, a chic NYC-style apartment and a tropical island estate, and each time his adaptable sensibility comes up with something new and entirely appropriate,” Jones says. She attributes the longevity of their working relationship to trust and a healthy bit of push and pull. “Yes, he does challenge me – he knows to leave me for a couple of days to consider a decision – but inevitably I come around to his way of thinking and time proves him to be right.”

Mosman residential project

One project Halliday has been able to revisit 21 years after he first designed it is a warehouse in Sydney’s Surry Hills originally owned by Sydney food and lifestyle photographer Geoff Lung. The new owners bought it within 40 minutes of the first viewing, and engaged Halliday to update it with a massive white dining table that wraps around two columns (“I wanted to do this originally but Geoff wanted more flexibility,” he says), and new furnishings, lighting and art. The space is elegant, contemporary and surefooted in all its design decisions, with much of the original interior left intact. “There was no need to change much of as it stood the test of time,” Halliday says.

While he does have many longstanding patrons who understand his modus operandi, he sees a shift in the quality of engagement of some current clients. The rise of social media platforms means everyone has an Instagram and a Pinterest account, and has watched The Block, and while he acknowledges that clients are better informed, he laments the loss of the mystique of his profession. “It can be frustrating when I am required to simply provide a safe pair of hands,” he says.

He notes that in his experience New York clients are often more respectful. “They are professionals – solicitors or hedge fund managers – and they let me do what I do best. I often look at the old projects and I know they wouldn’t be achievable now.”

Mosman residential project

That said, he still attracts significant projects where he can flex his creative mind. A recent residential project in Sydney’s Mosman, for which the practice delivered the architectural envelope as well as the interior as a complete work of art, is a good example. Not only did Halliday specify a 7m chandelier, designed by architect David Chipperfield originally for the Valentino stores, but such was the scale of the installation – craned in via a skylight – that a representative from Viabuzzino, the manufacturer, flew from Italy to oversee the process. With the same clients, he visited Milan Design Week to look at the work of Italian designer Vincenzo de Cotiis, whose art gallery-style pieces in recycled resin, cast brass and semi-precious stones blur the line between sculpture and function. The tones in the dining and coffee tables they chose informed the palette for the entire house, for which Halliday sourced everything from bedsheets to cutlery. The Lockheed Lounge by Marc Newson, which the clients bought in New York, is one of only 10 ever made and one of the few in private hands. It is now positioned in the lobby of the house.

One lesson Halliday learnt early on came when he was presenting his favoured Knoll furniture (designed by the mid-century greats Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Florence Knoll and Mies van der Rohe) to clients with a traditional house and saw their eyes glaze over at his suggestions. “I realised I needed to find a way to mix antiques and modernist pieces and create a dynamic between the two that works in terms of proportion and scale, but plays with style and era,” he says. This has developed into a great skill, and as a result he is able to add character and depth to spaces with predominantly contemporary furniture but equally sharpen up and modernise those with a more traditional bent.

An example is the refurbishment of an apartment in The Astor, an iconic 1920s building on Sydney’s Macquarie Street, a stone’s throw from the Sydney Opera House. It was stripped to a shell and everything rebuilt from the parquet floors up, shifting an original mantel, introducing more expressive cornicing, installing a Calacatta Viola marble kitchen and creating a built-in wardrobe. “We took a crackle-glaze pattern from a Balenciaga perfume box and custom-made the wallpaper; Tassinari silk covers concealed closet doors, and we chose furniture that worked with an existing Chinese cabinet belonging to the client,” says Halliday.

This is high-style, inspiring, old-school decorating, based on a deep knowledge and love of the craft, a far cry from the Instagram world of quick likes and 48-hour fitouts. While the decorative aspect is what catches the eye, the planning that makes the space flow so well is not as obvious. As Jean Wright recalls, “[Halliday] is brilliant with space – particularly the manipulating and planning of small spaces. His first little apartment in Kings Cross was so clever: a cube in the middle of the room with an inset sofa, dressing room and a bed on top, accompanied by just a few classic pieces of furniture he had been collecting from the age of 12.”