Tamsin Johnson, interior designer
Tamsin Johnson’s distinctive style has won her many followers since she started her own interior design practice. Now that relaxed yet elegant aesthetic has been captured in a new book.
I’d always wanted to do a book, but you don’t know when it will happen,” says Sydney-based interior designer Tamsin Johnson over a pot of ginger tea at her Paddington showroom. “You need a handful of amazing projects that show how your style has evolved, but also not too much so that you have established a footprint,” adds the 36 year old of her first coffee table tome, Tamsin Johnson: Spaces for Living, out next month with Rizzoli.
The in-demand Melburnian, who grew up immersed in her parent’s antique business, has parlayed a learned passion for old-world antiquity and an innate flair for contemporary furnishings into a unique style signature that encompasses design projects from Byron Bay’s Raes hotel to working with Matthew Csidei on James Packer’s former Bondi home and Los Angeles offices. “What I set out to achieve was a showcase of my work, but also the journey of integrating the interior and antique businesses,” she adds of the book’s 13 interior projects, which span her former Tamarama beach bungalow and good friend Lucy Folk’s Paris pied-à-terre,
The project arose from an introduction by fellow Rizzoli author, the London aesthete Alex Eagle. “I met Alex at the Venice Biennale after having one of those awkward Instagram friendships,” laughs Johnson about their aligned aesthetics. Last year Eagle featured the Sydney tastemaker with her husband of 10 years, tailor and entrepreneur Patrick Johnson, in her book More Than Just a House: At Home with Collectors and Creators. “She has a unique ability to browse trends and ideas and make them her own, creating something that is original and timeless,” Eagle explains from London, “and all this stylish stuff is presented in a package that you’d just love to live with.” Folk, who is currently working with Johnson on her Sunshine Coast abode and new Paddington store agrees: “I have never come across anyone who can marry such a classic sophistication with constant elements of surprise, and still always finish with a space that is such a joy to spend time in, in a very real and authentic sense.”
Johnson’s handsome hardback undresses not only the elegant ease of her interior style, but also the complexity of the eras, tactile textures, surprising shapes and grand silhouettes that she so masterfully manipulates into modern, comfortable and unpretentious design. Old world yet contemporary, Johnson’s work is as refined as it is relevant. “I always say, ‘restrained’, but my husband says, ‘It’s not restrained at all! It’s layered!” she laughs. “I want people to walk in wanting to ask questions. Is that antique? Where is it from? To trigger that emotion. Something they haven’t seen before tends to happen from the layers.” Indeed, old and new very happily cohabitat in all of Johnson’s spaces, whether a design brief calls for cool coastal or polished period. “I think not knowing the era of when an interior is designed is really nice, and making it feel hopefully like it was always there,” she says.
Of course, sourcing and valuing antiques, prominent mid-century furniture and artwork is another impressive facet of Johnson’s talent. “I think honestly that’s something that has to sink in over a lifetime,” she reflects. “Every weekend I watched Dad and Mum work in the shop and saw them at fairs. I guess you learn an area of something that interests you. Lots of Dad’s areas are not necessarily mine – he knows everything about Georgian furniture, I know nothing. But now I know a lot of mid-century furniture or 1930s glass,” she says of her penchant for trawling auction sites and 1stDibs. “It’s the same with artwork,” she continues, adding that half of her clients also commission her to do art curation.
Education is something they are increasingly seeking along with the finished product: “More and more the value of furniture and particular things I don’t want to say are ‘on trend’, because I hate the word, but things like Pierre Jeanneret, Jacques Adnet, Jean Royère. They’re the popular ones people are trying to collect, so clients are going on the journey with you.” She smiles. “And obviously they are hard to source overseas, let alone here.”
With much of her sourcing done in Europe, and projects in the works as far afield as a Koa hotel and private member’s club in Dubai for the Zaal family, how has the pandemic affected her procurement process? “I have buyers over there,” she says of the key European fairs, adding that she is watching one in Bologna on her phone. “It’s definitely cost effective, but not as romantic, and you are of course missing one of the best parts about your job.” The Johnsons, along with their two children, five-year-old Arthur and three-year-old Bunny, hope to spend 2023 in France, all things permitting: “I get itchy feet; we’ve always done the long three-month trips.”
Closer to home, Johnson is working on a big residential project in Port Douglas, and the refurbishment of Raes’ yacht, along with the Wategos hotel restaurant refresh for the spring. She’s also putting the finishing touches to their new family home, a 1920s heritage property in Sydney’s Darling Point. “Even the landscaping is heritage. It’s a bit more of a grown-up home than Tamarama,” she smiles, adding that friends with young children have already dubbed kids’ catch-ups at their place a liability. “Anything that was traditional we have kept and restored, from old timberwork to ceiling roses and cornices,” she says of the renovation that includes the refresh rather than remodelling of two original Art Deco bathrooms. “I’m very fast in my design process and very effective with my time now,” she says, when asked how she keeps it all in play. “Parenthood teaches you that.” As such, Johnson identifies instinct as her most precious resource, while her decisiveness keeps her projects on schedule: “I have a really small team, and I only take on as many projects as I can manage each year. It’s myself and two other girls, and then I have amazing contractors in every field, from metalworkers to builders, plasterers, joiners and tilers.” She’s particularly fond of reclaiming tiles from Italian palazzos. “I enjoy what I do so I don’t mind sitting with my laptop when the kids are having a snooze on the weekend.”
As for her go-to design details, “I love custom flooring and rug designs, sisal for anything quite coastal, marble that’s dealt with differently, and antique door hardware – the front of a house with an antique door handle makes such a difference.” She’s also partial to replacing solid doors with steel-framed glass ones to open up living spaces, venetian plaster tops in kitchens and bathrooms, statement seats from rattan cane Marcel Breuer to Fritz Neth’s sheepskin-covered club chairs, and memorable mirrors by Ettore Sottsass and Gio Ponti. Her top tip for bringing personality to a room? “Light. I don’t use downlights unless I have to.” Instead, Johnson favours wall sconces, especially in Murano glass. Is she a fan of balance? “I quite like a bit of symmetry around a fireplace and in a bathroom, but in awkward spaces you can’t use it so go the other way.”
Unsurprisingly, the one thing she’s not into are replicas. “Back in the day it was fake Eames chairs, fake Herman Miller. Now, it’s fake Jean Royère, Jacques Adnet, Pierre Jeanneret – all of their chairs. Someone put a lot of effort into that style a long time ago, and I think there are so many brilliant new designs without having to tread there. Besides, there’s so much more fun in designing new things,” she says, adding that her interiors are usually an equal three-way split of custom, contemporary and antique. “I enjoy everything being a bit obscure where I can.”
For herself, she collects vases, both 1930s glass Daum (her family give them to her to mark milestones) and Lalique, along with sculptural boxes. “I buy my husband one every year for his birthday and spend the whole year looking for it,” she says. She has collected art since she was 20. “I bought my first painting on Portobello Road – a beautiful oil, I think it was £200. My favourite thing when we are buying antiques overseas is looking for beautiful oils, 1920s, 1930s, still lifes, portraits.” And it’s not about hammer value: “Some of them are £50 and they are the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen and you have no idea who the artist is. You can’t google it. It’s that mystery.”
All of which ties back to her peripatetic childhood. Johnson grew up in Melbourne’s Armadale until the family moved to London for a year-long buying trip when she was four. “We went to school in Kensington and to the markets every weekend, whether in London or Europe,” she recalls. When they returned it was to an old bakery her parents gutted and turned into a gallery and home in Armadale, where Melbourne’s antique dealers were clustered at the time. “His favourite thing is a ‘shop and dwelling’,” she says of her father, Edward Clark, of Edward Clark Antiques. “Life and work was a blurred line as Mum and Dad love what they do. There would be clients coming into the kitchen and looking at our table. One day I came home and my desk was gone,” she laughs. By age 13 she was working in their gallery.
And while her sister Tess studied singing and ended up in fashion, Johnson did a Bachelor of Design in Fashion at RMIT University, then internships in PR and at Vogue, and with swimwear label Anna & Boy. “I got an amazing taste of Sydney life,” she remembers of the carefree era before London called again in 2006. “I applied for the internship at Stella McCartney and got it thinking I was the only person. There were loads of us!” She followed her introduction to fashionable Blighty with a placement at PR agency The Communications Store. “London was fabulous. I was having a great old time at 21, travelling every weekend, finding my feet in life, growing up.” After six months she met her husband at the iconic Notting Hill pub frequented by Aussies, The Westbourne. “Patch was there for eight years, working as a tailor, I was there for two,” she says of the working visa that supported her career transition to interior design.
“With fashion I never thought I could do something incredible,” she reflects. “I’m quite a classic dresser. I didn’t think I could do something unusual that hadn’t been done before.” A trip to Rome to meet her parents sealed the deal: “They were like, ‘Do it, you are young, you are over here.’ So she enrolled in London’s Inchbald School of Design’s interior design course. “I loved it; everyone was from around the world. It didn’t give me enough to start my own business,” she says of the nine-month course, “but the certainty of knowing I made the right decision.”
Does she miss fashion? “No, because I’m very much still in it,” she says, referring to her interiors for P. Johnson (including the ‘shop and dwelling’ they use for interstate stays at their Windsor location) and the women’s tailoring line P. Johnson Femme. “Patch is so involved in my business and I with his so I never feel like it’s a different world. He’ll look over every scheme I send to a client and I still like having a foot in.”
On her return to Australia, Johnson consulted Sener Besim and Gary Theodore (whom she worked for at Scanlan & Theodore while studying fashion) on her next career move. “Sener called Don McQualter and said, ‘You need to give Tam a job’,” she recalls, of the Sydney studio Meacham Nockles McQualter, where she spent five formative years. “I hustled my way in,” she smiles. “A lot of the people there were very architectural at the time, so they tasked me with the furniture side of things, which I loved.” The firm also provided her formal on-the-job design training. “Five years there was basically an architectural degree. They taught me how to draw, CAD, documentation, schedules, detail door jams, window construction, substratum of the floor,” she recalls. “It was like a family.” She has fond memories of designing residential and commercial projects from Mecca’s shopfronts to Bill Granger’s restaurants. But by March 2012 she had made the decision to set up her own business. “Work had given me a couple of clients, like helping with Bill Granger’s house in Bronte,” she says. “They were really kind in handing off work. Return clients are my favourite, because they know the process and they trust you. I got very lucky with some great jobs.”
Book box now ticked, does she have other unrealised ambitions? “I’d love to do a new build and eventually own a hotel and design it,” she says, “from the food to the wine.” As it turns out, Patrick, who once studied viniculture, has just added a boutique cabernet sauvignon with friend Julian Langworthy to the P.Johnson universe, so you can be pretty sure it’ll be really only a matter of where and when.
Tamsin Johnson: Spaces for Living (Rizzoli) is out on September 15. $110
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