![]() (The hotel was bought in late 2003 by 8Hotels, and many of the original fittings were replaced.) Over the next few decades the studio went into overdrive, delivering restaurants including the former Darley Street Thai, Paramount and the Summit, atop Harry Seidler’s Australia Square Tower (“Harry actually called to congratulate us on a fitout he considered better than his 1960s original,” recalls Halliday), and Oh Calcutta! It did shops for the Australian brand Dinosaur Designs in Sydney, Melbourne and, eventually, Manhattan, as well as fashion labels including Scanlon Theodore.īKH’s biggest splash in the hospitality sector was The Kirketon boutique hotel, in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, with its must-be-seen-at lobby bar and restaurant and its opulently austere play of shiny stone and plush upholstery. That firm soon mutated into Neil Burley & Partners, which eventually coalesced in the mid-’80s into Burley Katon Halliday. It was here that he discovered Architectural Digest, published in New York and renowned for capturing the hard-edged disco glamour of the era, mixed in with a modernist beach vibe shimmying down from the Hamptons and Fire Island.Įxcelling at design school, Iain was offered a job as a gofer by one of his tutors, David Katon, at a firm he worked with, Neil Burley Design. ![]() “He looked like a sort of bearded bushranger,” Halliday smiles at the memory, “dressed in corduroy and smoking a pipe.” Taking a look around the architect’s office, he decided “I need more glamour than this” and went on to enrol in the interior design course at East Sydney Technical College. Obsessed by Vogue Living (which launched in 1967) and Lego blocks (“they’d drive my parents and their guests crazy, scattered all over the house”), young Iain was introduced by his father to a real live architect colleague. The interior of the Woolwich house features hard brass fittings offset with plush silk velvets – and a covetable oil painting by Dale Frank. He recalls “graphic brown carpet” throughout the family home, some florid William Morris wallpapers, and “an overriding Parker aesthetic” – referring to Parker Furniture, the mid-century modern Australian cabinet-maker, which closed in 1997 unable to compete with cheap imports. “Oh, well, my mother definitely ran the house from an aesthetic perspective.” He attended a “sporty” private school where he happily “had two really good art teachers” at the age of nine he came home and announced to his bewildered parents, “I am going to be an architect!” “So, these seemingly incompatible extremes have come to coexist in my work.”īorn in Darwin, he grew up in Collaroy on Sydney’s northern beaches. “I began working in the opulent, big-budget 1980s and really hit my stride in the period of economic and aesthetic austerity of the 1990s,” Halliday says. Shown here: the reflecting pool of a recently completed house in Woolwich, Sydney. “Our work is split fifty-fifty between architecture and interiors,” says Halliday. It’s a mélange often referred to as “minimalist maximalism” – a delicious paradox, and an aesthetic that in less adept hands could go terribly awry. ![]() The interior is super-chic but extremely functional: a savvy mix of the austere and the ornate. Interior plaster fireplace surround tv#“These days our work is split fifty-fifty between architecture and interiors,” says Halliday, showing me through samples of plush chartreuse carpet with a bespoke trellis-and-lozenge pattern destined for the stairway of a Victorian Gothic mansion in Darling Point.Īround us are towering silver-leafed, crenellated cabinets (one hiding the TV used for client presentations) with glowing orange Lucite handles space-age 1960s French seating fluorescent, aerodynamic artworks by local sculptor Dion Horstmans. ![]() Occupying the ground floor of a grand Italianate terrace, BKH is entered via a chequerboard verandah a desk of marble slab signals a portal into otherworldliness, a cylindrical, translucent room divider allows hints of the action within, where 14 staff work on 30 projects. ![]() Over the past four decades, the now 62-year-old director of renowned Sydney interior design firm Burley Katon Halliday has delivered scores of timeless interiors with what New York-based online antiques purveyor 1stDibs calls a “magnificent audacity”.Īs excess comes back into vogue (literally, in the pages of Belle and Vogue Living as well as international style bibles Architectural Digest and The World of Interiors) it felt an opportune time to visit the Potts Point studio of the man behind some of Sydney’s signature interiors – including restaurants and hotels, bars and stores as well as tony homes up and down the Pacific coastline.ĭesigner Iain Halliday at the entrance of his Potts Point atelier (with red metal sculpture by Dion Horstmans, top left). Iain Halliday grew up knowing that becoming a designer was “inevitable” – and that was very good news for us. ![]()
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