The beautiful life and brutal death of design great Stuart Rattle

HE surrounded himself with refinement and appeared to lead a charmed life. Then Stuart Rattle was found dead, leaving friends to ask: why?

Stuart Rattle at Musk Farm, his country retreat in Daylesford, Victoria. Picture: Fairfax Syndications

SNOOPS and buyers who flocked to the auction of Musk Farm near the Victorian spa town of Daylesford five weeks ago may have missed a clue to the mystery of its owner’s death on the wall of the potting shed.

There, amid sepia photographs of the original 19th-century timber school house transformed by the late Stuart Rattle into a magnificent country retreat, hung the hints for an Easter egg hunt straight out of the Victorian era. Ornately illustrated capital letters announced each rhyming couplet leading children on a trail through the 1.4ha garden Rattle designed as a series of botanical rooms. Elegant cursive script drew them from the place where chestnuts are found, to the edge of the pond, to a weather vane, into the barn and then, when the game was almost done, a final lure was cast. “But do you think this is the end? Could Michael be your new best friend? Because you were so quick and smart; He may have gifts to warm your heart.”

This framed memento of happier times was not for sale when Musk Farm and its contents went under the hammer days before Rattle’s partner, Michael O’Neill, 47, appeared in court by video link from the Melbourne remand ­centre where he awaits trial on charges including murder and arson. With his hands clasped before him on the bare table, and prison guards in the background, he sat far removed from the richly furnished rooms he once shared with the interior design king. Whether Rattle was ­decorating a bedroom or preparing for Easter festivities, he exhibited a perfectionist’s control over the tiniest details.

His death at 53 rocked the country town where the couple had become champions of the botanical gardens, and reverberated through Melbourne’s wealthier homeowners who paid handsomely for his touch. A classicist who believed in creating fantasy with fabrics, cornices, wallpaper, cushions and drapes, Musk Farm was Rattle’s showcase. Antique follies, ­antlered stag heads and 17th-century oil portraits of long-forgotten figures in large gilt frames crowded the senses. “I like old pictures of dead people,” he once quipped of his collection.

But he’d always identified his favourite place as the outdoor sanctuary he’d cultivated from the blackberry-infested wasteland surrounding the then derelict school. His garden spaces teased visitors forward with a flight of steps or the glimpse of a sculpture through a gap in the hedgerow. Most glorious in spring, he’d opened Musk Farm last November to raise money for the Friends of Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens. Before the hordes arrived he was spotted raking the white gravel motor court. Two weeks later, on December 9, his body was found in bed at his city address in South Yarra by emergency crews summoned to extinguish flames devouring the French-style apartment he shared with O’Neill. Police subsequently alleged Rattle had been killed five days before the blaze.

Musk Farm now sits empty. The once magnificent garden misses its maker. Dead foliage ­mottles the closely clipped spherical box hedges that stand sentry outside a front door framed by ­classical adornments beckoning entry to another world. Friends remain perplexed by what went so ­grotesquely awry behind this impeccable facade.

“It totally knocked the wind out of my sails,” recalls John Graham, one of Rattle’s closest friends, who heard the designer had died in a fire on the 6am news. He left home in Mount Macedon and drove to South Yarra where he found O’Neill. “I hugged him.” Police and emergency crews had taped off access to the smouldering ruin. Antiques dealer Graham Geddes arrived soon afterwards. “It looked like a pyre,” he says. “The walls had imploded up to the ceiling and the surrounding perimeter was scorched. Forensic people had been through already.”

Former TV personality Simone Semmens, a friend of both men, dashed to the scene. As information filtered into the public arena, ­several details surprised those familiar with ­Rattle’s routine. He always enjoyed a four-day weekend at Musk, working in his bijou studio on ­Mondays. What was he doing in Melbourne on Sunday night? The candles that allegedly started the midnight blaze were out of kilter with ­Rattle’s fastidious nature. His partner was reportedly out walking their three Jack Russell terriers Astor, Bertie and Teddy at the time.

“Look, we don’t actually know what happened,” landscape designer Paul Bangay told the media as he paid tribute to his friend and colleague. “Stuart was found in his bed, which was a blessing in some ways. He was not ­conscious when the fire consumed him. He was not trying to get out.”

Judgment was suspended in the haze of shock. The sight of O’Neill in the downstairs office making phone calls and scheduling ­meetings was interpreted as grief. “You never really know when people have lost someone so close. I thought this was a frenetic reaction,” reflects Graham, who stayed around until Wednesday. “He was still working. He was going on almost at an increased pace of activity.”

The shopfront of Stuart Rattle Interior Design filled up with floral tributes. Outside on the pavement, those who came by offering condolences embraced each other. Inside, O’Neill kept busy. He called craftsman Kim Moir to place an order for Rattle’s custom-built casket. He wrote a brief death notice that was published in Wednesday’s Herald Sun newspaper. It read: “My dearly loved partner. We are one.”

O’Neill and Rattle had lived together and worked side by side for 16 years. They complemented each other. Rattle was the gifted front man, O’Neill his versatile sidekick. Rattle strove for aesthetic beauty while O’Neill facilitated his partner’s wishes. Rattle was the lankier of the two; O’Neill had darker hair. They were charming company. Rattle was witty and opinionated; O’Neill was easygoing, well versed at listening. Both were good cooks, hosting lunches and dinners for friends who recall friction and occasional public tiffs but no more than trouble most partnerships. They are at a loss to explain why one of them is dead and the other now banished from sight.

Stuart Rattle showed a flair for design from an early age. His mother Jill recalls his desire to improve everything around him. As a young boy in the Riverina he used to help an elderly ­neighbour in the garden, often visiting a nearby nursery where he peppered the owner with questions. His first job after school was designing clothes for The Plete boutique in Richmond, which he ran with his cousin. Handsome, and gay, he soon struck up a relationship with Paul Bangay, then a student. “We were kindred spirits,” ­Bangay recalls. “Although he designed fashion he was always more interested in interior design. We shared an apartment together and we were always either dreaming or in some very cheap and simple way redesigning its interior.” Rattle’s passion for high quality finishes held sway. They had a sofa covered in the Connolly leather used by Rolls-Royce.

The charismatic pair became entwined with the late society florist Kevin O’Neill and his partner John Graham. O’Neill was akin to ­royalty during the 1980s when partying reached its zenith. On weekends Rattle and Bangay were frequent guests at the florist’s spectacular Mount Macedon property. “Stuart couldn’t wait to get out into the garden with Kevin,” Graham remembers.

Antiques dealer Graham Geddes describes a “cabal” of designers, florists, collectors and caterers servicing events for the top end of town. “We all worked together. I’m straight but I loved Kevin and Stuart and Paul,” Geddes says. The late interior designer John Coote was another colourful participant. Through these contacts Rattle began to dabble in furniture and design.

He had no formal training but was blessed with “an eye” for refinement. “You’re either born with it, you achieve it or it is thrust upon you. Stuart Rattle had taste,” insists Geddes. During visits to Mount Macedon he’d suggest improvements. “He’d say in a perfectly friendly way, ‘Do you think this would look better’ and he was invariably right,” Graham says. “It was John Coote who said to Stuart, ‘You have innate style. Get out of the rag trade’.” He rebranded his Richmond boutique Stuart Rattle Interiors. His first big project was the Jolimont terrace he decorated for his parents Ken and Jill, which ­featured on the cover of a glossy magazine. His career soon galloped into another realm.

Melbourne architect Nicholas Day encountered the designer in the 1990s, when blue-chip customers building grand houses with budgets of $10 million or more brought him in to complete interiors. “We started to get him involved in our projects because he was so very good,” Day says. Rattle’s confidence grew with priceless publicity in the pages of Belle, Home Beautiful and Vogue Living, where he sounded at times like a parody of excess, pontificating on 600-thread-count linen or Hungarian goose-down or the order of plump pillows on an upholstered bed head. He believed bedrooms were the hearth of a house: “The first place you see and the last.”

Michael O’Neill came on board as his ­assistant several years after they met in 1998 at the Cafe Latte bistro, down the street from ­Rattle’s office. O’Neill worked as a waiter. ­Neither had a tertiary education and they both hailed from the country. Rattle had spent years in the Riverina town of Barham while O’Neill’s family settled in the western district municipality of Terang. He’d earned his keep serving at the up-market Queenscliff restaurant owned by the late Mietta O’Donnell.

Michael O’Neill’s conversational manner masked Rattle’s diffidence. “Stuart didn’t have the ­greatest social skills in the world,” says ­Bangay. “He was a bit insecure and shy although he hid this well through appearing very confident about his work.” O’Neill moved in with Rattle. They lived above the business. Rattle’s father, Ken, renovated the upstairs apartment that the designer decorated in lavish Parisian style. Weekends were spent at Daylesford where ­Rattle had bought his retreat in 1998. He’d driven past a “For Sale” sign with Bangay, who was doing up an old school house in nearby Woodend. “Initially Stuart didn’t like it but after dropping me home he went straight back,” Bangay says. Twilight’s golden aura fired ­Rattle’s imagination.

During a decade-long labour of love he ­converted the school house and then tamed the tangle that surrounded it. “He was definitely a perfectionist,” Bangay says. “He was relentless about details and craftsmanship. Thin walls were never to be tolerated, off-the-shelf doors, bookshelves, gates etc never allowed. They all had to be custom-made.” On his website Rattle declares: “The most important thing about a room is that it offers some emotion.” He deplored open-plan living because it dispensed with the theatre of discovery. He preferred to create suspense inside and out guided by the idea that “you feel a room before you look at it”.

He decorated the bedroom at Musk Farm with olive green wallpaper first used in ­London’s Houses of Parliament in 1856. “It makes me happy,” he told The Sunday Age in 2012, stressing the need for bedside tables big enough to hold “a lamp, a radio or clock, a glass and water jug, a cup of tea, a glass of whisky and a stack of books. There it is, my whole life ­sitting next to me.”

The catalogue of items sold at auction reveal his exquisite indulgence. An oak four-poster bed upholstered in olive damask silk ($10,370), ­walnut bedside tables with crossed stretcher base on bun feet ($7930), 18th-century Chinoiserie black lacquer cabinet ($8540), and so on down to the Ming dynasty figure of a scholar holding the head of a domestic animal ($561).

How much O’Neill contributed to the decor or creative philosophy is unclear since he’s barely decipherable in the lengthy shadow ­Rattle cast. So subterranean is his profile that The Australian Women’s Weekly could not find a photograph of the couple in a tribute to Rattle published in March. “I don’t remember them not being together,” says Day. Like so many who mingled with them, Day knew little about O’Neill’s beginnings. “I thought he came from New Zealand.” He was one of three children whose family emigrated from Ireland. His mother, Anne, declined an interview.

Paul Sumner, whose company Mossgreen auctioned the contents of Musk, is not surprised by O’Neill’s small footprint. “It was all about Stuart. In any relationship you get one person who has the spotlight and another person stays in the background. Michael didn’t get any profile. I’m sure he was doing a lot of work behind the scenes but it was Stuart’s name on the door.”

Most often associated with sweeping curtains and gilt luxury, Rattle also brought a modernist edge to traditional interiors. Early 20th-century giants such as American decorator Billy Baldwin and Englishman John Fowler inspired his ­worship of colour, comfort and eclecticism.

“Stuart was a supercilious snob in a fun way,” says Geddes. “He was a flamboyant ­person who everyone loved. Sometimes he’d say, ‘I can’t be bothered dealing with people who have no taste’.” He once turned heel on a customer with this parting shot: “Listen ­darling, you’re not the only girl in South Yarra with a truckload of cash.”

Many of his patrons befriended him. He’d been working on the Toorak Arts and Crafts house of Village Roadshow’s chairman Robert Kirby and his wife Mem for eight years. From the cast iron lights to the timber staircase to the handmade rugs, he’d fussed over every detail. At their last meeting in late November Mem Kirby laughed with Rattle at the length of the project. “I said to him, ‘We’ll probably grow old together’ and he said, ‘I think we will’.”

Stories about Rattle uncover an occasional reference to “we” and “our” acknowledging his significant other but there is scant elaboration in interviews he gave of O’Neill’s role behind the scenes. The two men would visit clients together. Day remembers them arriving with bolts of fabric and drawings to run through the interior of a new project. Dealers and suppliers and builders had most to do with O’Neill as he leveraged his deepening engagement in the business. “He was very involved,” says Day. “Not in the design, but in the organisation.”

Norman Paul, whose company Mortice & Tenon crafted a furniture range for Rattle, says: “All my dealings were with Michael. Stuart was the creative one but Michael would pass on all the drawings. I always found him stressed out. He was always stressed. We were always chasing him to get answers about colour stains or instructions. He always needed to get back to me. I felt he was out of his depth.”

Kim Moir, who custom-built dining tables and chairs for Rattle during a 20-year partnership, tells a similar tale. “Michael couldn’t cope. He wouldn’t write anything down. It drove ­Stuart mad. People would ring me and say, ‘We love Stuart, we love what he does, we love what you do but we can’t deal with the office. Customers would ring me and say, ‘Michael says my table is ready’. I’d ask, ‘What table is that?’ They’d say, ‘My dining table’. I’d have no record of it in my drawings and quotes.”

Rattle hired a personal assistant to track orders and introduced a “day book” for recording transactions but each new system invariably came unstuck. The stuff-ups raised eyebrows but in an industry where deadlines are notoriously elastic, hiccups were excused because his brand commanded such respect. “Michael opted to run the mechanics of the show. We would get an order without a deposit and once furniture was made [payment] would take forever,” says Geddes, who stayed loyal because of his “love and affection” for Rattle. “Michael always promised things but nothing ever happened.”

O’Neill’s modus operandi became an occupational hazard that Rattle tolerated. “Stuart would say, ‘I love him. I live with him. I’ve sacked him so many times. He promises not to do it again’,” recalls Moir. The meticulous attention to minutiae in the trimming of interiors and the garden that became his obsession was absent from the tedious slog of record-keeping. But if this was poisoning the couple’s relationship, those close to them did not witness a rift.

O’Neill and Rattle became increasingly absorbed in Musk Farm. Rattle designed and built a studio close to the house where he would work on Fridays and Mondays, extending his weekend visits. In 2003 he bought the adjoining 36ha farm, where they began breeding a herd of rare British white cattle. Friends joked that the cows’ chalky hides and black noses against the green pasture were a picturesque prop. O’Neill took ownership of the steers, showing them successfully at a country show. He sought help from florist Leigh Clark, who has a stud farm. “It was Michael’s passion,” Clark says. “I remember ­Stuart in the background, collecting the ribbons.”

Rattle intended making Musk his full-time home. “He was happiest when by himself at his farm,” remembers Bangay of Rattle’s reclusive streak. Although he formed “deep and long-term relationships with a few friends and the ­clients he loved”, Bangay says the designer “hated parties, preferring lunches at his farm where he controlled the environment”.

The couple became active in the Daylesford community through Rattle’s patronage of the Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens. When he met members of this support group at a street plant stall in 2010 they had $1000 in the bank. Think big, he urged, offering open gardens at Musk that raised $200,000 in three years. Patrice O’Shea, spokeswoman for Friends of Wombat Hill, dubbed him “the Angel”. Rattle was vice-president, O’Neill his Treasurer. Restoring the fernery came first. Next were hedges that had turned feral, and beyond lay the job of replacing 150-year-old trees. “He had a grand vision,” O’Shea says. “They were a remarkable couple, both first-class men, that was what made it so terribly hard,” she gulps, referring to what she calls “the elephant in the room”.

“It’s such a painful business. It’s still raw, still hard.” Locals can’t help but pick through the entrails of idle gossip and swirling rumour that fogs the truth of Rattle’s violent end.

Least prepared were the men who had travelled with Rattle and O’Neill on a four-week jaunt through the UK and France last September. Wayne Cross and Chris Malden, who own Spa Country resorts, had got to know the ­couple through a shared interest in British white cattle. With another local couple forming a group of six, they visited French chateaus and English manors, retracing the overseas tour ­Rattle had taken decades earlier with his mentors Kevin O’Neill and John Graham.

“We lived in each other’s pockets,” says Malden. They stayed at the exclusive Brown’s Hotel in London and lunched at Hotel le Bristol in Paris. “We had many meetings prior to ­departure to map out our itinerary,” Cross recalled in his eulogy. Dinners held in the lead-up to departure always uncorked Stuart’s favourite French champagne. “It would be fair to say that Stuart changed not only the way we decorate our homes but what we drink, what we eat and the way we dress … During these meetings it was made clear that there were to be no soft collar shirts or white sneakers; that we must bring at least two dinner jackets each, and that we were all too old to wear shorts! Of course we followed these instructions to the letter.”

Soon after their return, Rattle threw himself into arranging the upcoming open garden at Musk on November 23. That night he rang Bangay, saying, “I’m totally exhausted. The garden’s wrecked. I don’t think I can do it again.”

On the morning of Tuesday, December 3, Rattle and O’Neill drove to Portsea where they were delivering valises and cushions to a Toorak couple who’d built a dream getaway. The clients did not notice anything untoward. There had been a few minor problems during the two-year project. “Sometimes there was a little bit of ­Stuart being the real interior decorator and Michael his assistant, but nothing unusual or embarrassing occurred,” says the husband, who does not wish to be named.

The police case is that Rattle was killed on Wednesday, December 4. On the Friday night, O’Neill drove to Daylesford, where he attended drinks to toast the success of the Wombat Hill open garden event. He is said to have told guests Rattle had a terrible headache but sent his apologies. They accepted that the stress of ­readying Musk Farm for show had taken its toll. Champagne flowed. “Everyone was disappointed,” recalls Malden. “But it had been such a busy few weeks, we’d covered a lot of miles travelling, then when Stuart and Michael returned they’d been preparing the ­garden. Obviously Stuart was tired yet it seemed unusual Stuart wasn’t there, given he was going to be president this year.”

At midnight on Sunday, December 8, fire engulfed Rattle’s apartment. News of his death spread within hours. “I’ll always remember where we were when we heard,” says Malden. “We were at our house planting New Zealand rock lilies Stuart had given us. He didn’t like them because they die in cold weather so he’d tugged them out and insisted we plant them at our place in Smeaton where it’s slightly warmer.”

“Woe betide if a plant wasn’t earning its keep,” chuckles Graham affectionately. “It would be pulled out and moved elsewhere.” He is mystified by what happened. “I think about it constantly, the sadness of it.”

O’Neill has rung him several times from prison but their conversations circle the alleged crime. Cross and Malden have also received calls. “It’s difficult for everybody involved,” says Malden. They grieve for losing not one but two dear friends. First the shock of Rattle’s death, followed four days later by O’Neill’s arrest.

Not surprisingly for a designer who’d spent a lifetime pursuing an ideal of beauty, he’d set the stage for his own send-off. During visits to Moir’s workshop he’d stand inside the wooden coffin that leant against the wall. “I made it for my mother-in-law 15 years ago but she didn’t die,” Moir says. “Stuart used to say, ‘It fits me. You’re making mine.’ Michael rang me after the fire and asked me to do it.”

Modelled on the Pope’s coffin, Moir used American oak with dovetail joints and no nails or handles. The letter “S” was picked out in gilt beneath a cross on the front. Rattle’s body was swaddled in a handwoven silk rug that he’d loved. The funeral was a private service held by his family in Melbourne. The Daylesford memorial was crowded. Patrice O’Shea asked guests to bring photos of the designer: “His preference would be for a silver frame.”

She spoke of how he’d discussed his funeral: “always thinking ahead and thinking style … there would be beautiful Baroque music and there would be chicken sandwiches and champagne for afters. And we wouldn’t wear black … He had even planned the sheets that would be used. But of course he was thinking of himself as an old enfeebled man.” She asked mourners “how a gentle and urbane person could have come to such an end. And the unspoken question is — what of Michael?”

Rattle has been laid to rest. His legacy was celebrated at the recent Australian Antique and Art Dealers’ Association show in Melbourne. Penguin is publishing a tribute to the designer later this year. Musk Farm will soon be occupied by new owners. They are expected to maintain a garden widely admired as one of the most beautiful in Australia. O’Neill awaits committal proceedings in the straitened surroundings of confinement.

Interiors may be wallpapered and dressed with exquisite furnishings but the lives within them can fray and unravel at a furious pace. Perfection is rarely what it seems.