“She said, ‘I like this, this, this and this’,” recalls Richard Haigh, Parterre’s owner of 34 years.

The woman — who parted with $100,000 in one visit — was a Saudi Arabian princess.

When Haigh offered to arrange to help her get the goods back home, she told him it wouldn’t be necessary: she owned her own shipping line.

Founded in 1985 by Haigh and his then partner, landscape gardener Annie Wilkes, Parterre is today a local institution — the kind that attracts, at the very least, eastern suburbs royalty.

But when the doors of the historical 1856 sandstone house (formerly a bank and post office) opened as Parterre back in the ’80s, it was a pioneering concept.

While Queen St was an antiques mecca, Haigh and Wilkes led the way for a new type of design where gardens and interiors were designed together.

What’s more they were among the first to introduce topiary and Versaille planters to houses Down Under, bringing the charmed aesthetic of Tuscany and Provence to Sydney.

Star clients included Neil Perry’s Rockpool (Parterre did the landscaping) and milestone moments, the complete design of a 4000-acre cattle property owned then by Impulse Airlines founder Gerry McGowan and his wife Sue.

Haigh and Wilkes spent five years working on the latter, planting thousands of trees and sourcing antique pieces for the house, as well as French gates for the vineyard.

In 2009 Wilkes left — the pair’s personal separation had happened in 2004 — to set up Annie Wilkes Design, based in Willoughby.

“We brought the best of European design at a time when Australia had a thirst for anything French and Italian,” says Haigh. “We were a brilliant team.” Wilkes, he says, is “one of the most talented designers working in Australia”.

“Unfortunately we grew apart.”

Since then Haigh has made it his mission to keep Parterre fresh by constant reinvention and reinvigoration. It’s evident in his window displays. “The windows are so important to me — every three minutes the traffic lights change and (the drivers) have got to be looking at something,” he says, gesturing out the window, where, as dusk sets in, cars zoom past and couples stop to gawk inside, pushing their heads against the glass to take in the display featuring Greek olive jars and the 19th century mirror.

Five years ago he opened a Waterloo presence in Danks St.

Then in 2017, he opened Cafe Parterre, where punters sit on French antique chairs and eat with cutlery sourced from French flea markets. Serving strong coffee and moreish pastries, it proved so popular — an oasis in the city — that 40-minute waitlists on the weekend and queues down the street are common.

For Haigh, the outdoor cafe served to “broaden our community”. It was the serene atmosphere that kept them there. Even the al fresco toilet is ravishingly beautiful with its bronze Roman-style fountain for a basin; Italian terracotta tiles lining the floor and an ornate mirror decked with delicate powder-blue and pastel-pink flowers (hand-blown from Murano glass from Venice).

There’s even a Venetian chandelier sitting smack above the loo, through which light spills in all directions. “You’ve got to glam it up a little bit,” laughs Haigh.

This month, however, Cafe Parterre will close. The serenity of the courtyard will nurture, instead, an event and design space, available to rent for photo shoots, parties and private dinners, to be held in the 16-seater candlelit Belgium glasshouse.

Haigh admits it is a wrench, but tells the Wentworth Courier: “I love projects. So creating the cafe has been fantastic, and we’ve been extremely successful — we have a group of people running down the gates every morning.

“We may look toward the future with another cafe, but for us, it makes more sense to utilise the area more as a design space.”

As part of this seismic transformation in the business, Parterre’s outdoor furniture showroom in Danks St, Waterloo, will also shut its doors on June 24.

The furniture — including Belgium’s Royal Botania, Sweden’s Skargaarden and America’s Tuuci Umbrellas (brands for which Parterre is Australia’s sole agent) — will be moved to Woollahra.

At the same time, he is opening a new studio in Ocean St, a few doors down from Parterre.

As Haigh puts it: “Why not bring those two businesses together and create a whole design centre?” and where else but here. “Woollahra,” he says, “is my heart and soul.”

The Ocean St site has the working title of “The Annexe”. He is planning more private design consultations. “There is no room for complacency in design,” he says.

When we meet on Tuesday afternoon, Haigh, 56, greets me in practical shorts and trainers, looking every inch the gardener, before changing into a nifty floral shirt and suit for the photo shoot.

As he poses, the photographer has to dance around stacks of candles, vases of fresh flowers (Haigh rises on Fridays at 2.30am to go to the Flemington Flower Markets) and trays of luxury soaps, not to mention the brass lampshades, potted plants, and clusters of French ceramic guineafowl sculptures. Haigh’s 13-year-old daughter Sienna helps around the shop, while his labradoodle Maddie potters in the courtyard.

His wife, Kristin, runs Woollahra Physiotherapy in Jersey Rd. Fitted out with French antique mirrors, chandeliers and Belgium linen it, too, sports the Parterre look.

The hunt is what makes Haigh’s work exciting. He travels to Europe three times a year, with scant idea of what he will find. Often he drives for hours to meet a single dealer or to see a single hero piece he has heard about.

That could be a porcelain and crushed granite bath, circa 1900, like the one he discovered in a Paris flea market, which weighed more than a tonne. It took a crane to get it into the shop and was sold after a week — with another crane having to lug it out again. Today the bath has pride of place in a Bellevue Hill home. Or it could be a 1920s Belgium marble patisserie, in the classic Art Nouveau style, currently on sale for $24,000.

Heavy brown furniture, once sought after, is firmly out, replaced by 1960s and ’70s pieces that feel more contemporary and suited to modern life but still retain the workmanship of a time when craft was king. Says Haigh: “I buy what I like. I don’t buy what I think is in fashion. I think it’s really important you buy with your heart and you let the market follow you.”

Parterre has had its struggles: particularly during the mining downturn, when clients from Western Australia started to drop off. But Haigh asserts that business is now booming. The vast majority of clients are locals with whom he has longstanding relationships.

“Some of those people I’ve known for 30 years — I’ve done their houses, I’m doing their children’s houses,” he says.

Clearly, the process still delights him. One of Haigh’s favourite times is when he receives a new crate of treasures he has sent back from Europe. Then, he closes the shop for five days, covers the windows up and unpacks.

“And we pull down the curtains and it’s like the big reveal,” he smiles. “It’s almost like theatre.”