The Luxury Report | Issue 7

ISSUE 7 FASHIONING A LEGACY Alex Schuman and Karlie Ungar on upholding the vision of the late great Carla Zampatti.

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Welcome note

Kay & Burton Managing Director ROSS SAVAS

It goes without saying that the notion of legacy is never far from mind at Kay & Burton. Every day, through interactions with our clients and the talented individuals who help craft our homes and cities, we ask: ‘What’s important? And what might be important 20, 50 or 100 years from now?’

Whether it’s the enduring appeal of great architecture, the ripple effect of historical events, or the legacy of the world’s tradition-keepers and innovators, we take notice; we are inspired. And we know that our readers think about this too; about making decisions and taking actions with the intention of leaving behind a worthwhile legacy for friends, families, communities and future generations alike.

Our cover story centres on a legacy that looms large on the Australian fashion landscape: that of Carla Zampatti, the woman and brand. Here the late designer’s son, brand CEO Alex Schuman, invites us into his family’s Woollahra home to discuss the vision that he and creative director Karlie Ungar have for the label’s future (p36).

Exploring the balance between heritage and innovation further, we venture to Champagne to learn of the changes afoot for the region’s perfectionist growerproducers (p16), and to the 16th-century Villa Medici to review its once-in-ageneration design rejuvenation (p28).

Elsewhere, we take the temperature of Australia’s ultra-prime property market with the assistance of Mark Browning at NAB Private Wealth (p10) and delve into global equity investing with JBWere’s Sally Auld (p14).

We meet the founder of a global industry-leading skincare label born in Melbourne (p44), speak to legendary garden designer Paul Bangay about starting fresh as he approaches his 60th year (p48), and discuss inherited values with two of Australia’s most prominent hospitality clans: the Perrys and the Grossis (p32).

I hope these pages provide food for thought when ruminating on your own influences or legacy, together with a delectable serve of inspiration for your everyday.

As ever, I enthusiastically await your feedback and ideas for future issues.

ISSUE 7 04 ENGINEERING A BETTER EARTH On a mission to change the world, biotech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and his global coalition of geneticists are redefining conservation’s future.

06 THE SHORTLIST Discover Australian clay light fittings, tropical outdoor furniture, a showstopping resin chair and more.

08 CHASING THE COMMON GOOD Impact investor Radek Sali shares his philosophy on compassionate leadership and bringing a healthy dose of purpose to business.

10 YEAR OF THE TROPHY HOME We explore how strong demand from buyers at home and abroad has resulted in a record-breaking year for prestige property sales across Australia.

14 SPREADING YOUR WINGS As geographic diversification grows in relevance, JBWere’s Sally Auld helps unpack investment opportunities beyond Australian shores.

32 CULINARY INHERITANCE How two prominent families of food are drawing from the past, looking to the future, and creating an inspiring multigenerational legacy.

44 WORD OF GLOW Cosmetic chemist Richard Parker on the stellar science-backed rise of his skincare brand Rationale and the power of ‘skintuition.’

48 WHEN ROOTS RUN DEEP Upon the release of his latest book, renowned landscape architect Paul Bangay reflects on a life in garden design.

52 DESIGN IN DIALOGUE Perth-based multidisciplinary artist and designer Olive Gill-Hille on the literal and metaphorical physicality behind her sensual sculptures in wood.

60 OUT AND ABOUT Dine on French classics, explore art by established and next-gen talent, and witness the world's greatest bel canto tenor.

28 IN THE DREAM HOUSE A remarkable restoration project involving some of Europe’s most exciting creatives is transforming Rome’s historic Villa Medici.

36 FASHIONING A LEGACY Discover what's next for the Carla Zampatti brand in our conversation with Alex Schuman, the late designer's son and company CEO, and its creative director Karlie Ungar.

21 EXQUISITE DISSONANCE

Cover: Karlie Ungar and Alex Schuman photographed by Saskia Wilson.

Acclaimed Iranian-Australian photographer Hoda Afshar discusses art, activism and life ahead of her new major exhibition at The Art Gallery of New South Wales.

CONTRIBUTORS NAB

EDITORIAL

Sally Auld Chief Investment Officer JBWere

Managing Editors Nick Kenyon Luke McKinnon

Mark Browning Head of Property Services Group

Editors Emma Pegrum Carlie Trotter

KAY & BURTON

Art Director Aaron Dunn

Ross Savas Managing Director Peter Kudelka Executive Director Gowan Stubbings Executive Director

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Champagne: A delicate balance

Alex Schiavo Executive Director Scott Patterson Executive Director Tom Barr Smith Executive Director

Writers Tim Boreham Leanne Clancey Lachlan Colquhoun Steve Dow Catherine Gillies Grace O’Neill Genevieve Phelan Anna Snoekstra Tyson Stelzer Louise Tigchelaar-Belfield Lucianne Tonti Design Stories we tell

With a raft of economic and environmental factors reshaping the industry, how might the future look for Champagne’s small grower-producers?

ADVERTISING

56 Without compromise With the lifestyle benefits of simplicity and flexibility, apartments have become more spacious, more luxurious—and more desirable—than ever before.

Nick Kenyon Head of Luxury Strategy, Kay & Burton Telephone +61 3 9825 2554 nkenyon@kayburton.com.au 226 Toorak Road, South Yarra Vic 3141

The Luxury Report is published four times a year. Copyright © Kay & Burton.

Printed by Neo, 5 Dunlop Road, Mulgrave Victoria 3170 The contents of this document (contents) have been prepared and are provided by Kay & Burton (which means and includes Kay & Burton Pty Ltd, its associated entities and its officers, servants, contractors, employees and agents) in good faith. Some of the contents have been provided to Kay & Burton by others. Kay & Burton does not represent or warrant the accuracy of the contents. The contents are provided solely for information purposes and do not constitute any recommendation, advice or direction by Kay & Burton for anyone to use any of the contents to make any decision about anything and in particular, about making any investment or participating in or acquiring, disposing, selling or purchasing anything or entering into any agreement, arrangement or dealing (whether legally binding or not). Kay & Burton recommends that any such decision should only be made following the receipt of advice from an appropriately qualified advisor.

By Gab Cos

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Engineering a better Earth Ahead of his appearance at the Sydney edition of the famed South by Southwest futurist festival out of Texas, serial tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm lets us in on his Jurassic Park-inflected plan to halt the nature crisis by genetically resurrecting woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers. – By Carlie Trotter Sparkly-eyed and affable, 41-year-old tech executive Ben Lamm possesses a unique talent for thinking beyond what most of us believe is possible and seems to be living out his dream role at the helm of Colossal Biosciences, the de-extinction company he founded with Harvard geneticist George Church two years ago. The audacious goal of the Dallas-based startup, which has raised US$225m in funding to date, is to rewind biodiversity loss by reverse-engineering lost keystone species such as the woolly mammoth.

In pushing the boundaries of CRISPR gene-editing technology, Colossal and its worldwide coalition of biologists are developing software and equipment to advance genomic science in general, with major potential benefits for food production and human healthcare as well as wildlife conservation. While the company posits that returning iceage beasts to the Arctic could support the healthy grassland ecosystem needed to slow the thawing of the permafrost (Earth’s largest carbon sink), its gene-hacking research will also inform disruptive conservation efforts to save the modern-day elephant by accelerating the development of vaccines against life-threatening viruses, for example.

If this quest to heal our hurting planet seems like a left turn in Lamm’s software-oriented career, he says working at the intersection of science fact and fiction feels oddly familiar. With five successful startup exits under his belt, including the sale of military-focused AI platform Hypergiant in August, Lamm knows plenty about commercialising emerging technologies. “I'm attracted to technology problems.

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I look at core systems and think about how we should engineer them, and de-extinction is a systems problem; the hardest I've taken on to date but still a systems problem,” he suggests. “With Colossal, I'm living a bit in the future and a bit in the past—sometimes 10,000 years in the past—but I've always lived a little bit in the future. I entered the mobile gaming, conversational intelligence and AI industries before they had matured, and didn’t know much about satellite systems when I got into that category, but I like to work with far smarter people than myself to see how we can leverage technology to build a better world.”

He continues: “A lot of entrepreneurs, me included, have said they’re creating this or that company because they want to have an impact, but when you are given an opportunity like Colossal to truly change the world, not taking it would feel like hypocrisy.” Fuelled by his own fierce curiosity and the possible long-horizon returns, Lamm could not resist the chance to collaborate with George Church and other scientists who have been diligently unlocking DNA secrets for over a decade, including thylacine authority Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne and dodo expert Beth Shapiro.

“If we're successful in our journey, the world's never the same,” he says. “[Before Colossal] no one had said ‘we're going to solve this problem, we're going to treat it like the moon landing and give it the infrastructure, brain power and money it deserves’.

What if you could go back and invest in NASA? I’m not saying we’re anywhere near as cool as NASA, but I think a lot of

people would take that investment.” This philosophy appears to be shared by big-name investors in the firm, such as Seattle biotech venture capitalist Robert Nelsen, Hollywood exec Thomas Tull (producer of 2015’s Jurassic World, funnily enough) and crypto pioneers the Winklevoss twins. In June, having secured unicorn status with a valuation of more than US$1bn, Colossal appeared on Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Companies list.

Lamm believes investor interest in Colossal coincided with a broader “hunger for moonshots” following the introspection of the Covid era. He says: “It was the initial feedback of the public and the scientific community that drove us to raise more capital to accelerate our work, perhaps because when we were all locked down we realised how quickly things can be taken away from us, how we should be making the time that we have count, and at least try to do bigger and more important things, even if we fail.” According to recent computer modelling by ecologists at Flinders University, 10 per cent of the plants and animals documented today will have disappeared by 2050, while Australia has long borne the shame of the highest mammal extinction rate in the world.

Sharing Colossal’s latest learnings with an Australian audience is particularly important to Lamm, whose standard work schedule is an almost 24-hour one owing to the international nature of the firm’s research partnerships and advisor network. “Last time I was in Melbourne, a bartender jumped over the bar to show me her thylacine tattoo. This animal only died out in the 1930s so we’re carrying the cultural guilt of that; working on something that will have cultural impact as well as scientific and ecological impact is inspiring,” he says. Actor Chris Hemsworth is among the local investors supporting Colossal, and the company claims to be seeking counsel from Indigenous leaders as well as conservation groups such as Aussie Ark. Following Professor Pask’s sequencing of the Tassie tiger genome in 2017, funding and technical support from Colossal is now helping his team develop artificial womb technology to reanimate Australia’s only apex predator marsupial (and ultimately aid in the protection of still-living species like the koala). The absence of the wolf-like creature is thought to have led to Tasmanian devils becoming endangered by allowing weak and diseased individuals to survive longer and infect others, and to pest species becoming overabundant. The quality of preserved DNA means the thylacine is likely the first candidate for genetic resurrection, with a decade from now touted as a feasible timeframe.

You need not be a scientist to see how artificial womb technology could change the course of human history. “That's actually the most sci-fi thing we're working on, and because of how close I am to the scientists every day, even that doesn't even feel [futuristic] anymore,” says Lamm. The obscure discoveries and sequential innovations on the journey to deextinction are what really interest the entrepreneur. “You can't just go solve one little piece of biology; you have to build the computational biology, the cellular engineering, the advanced embryology… we have microscopes with lasers attached to them that drill holes into cells to make somatic cell nuclear transfer (the technique used to clone Dolly the sheep) more

efficient—now that does feel a little Jurassic Park-y,” he adds.

Barely a year after launch, Colossal had spun out its first business based on AI software developed to rapidly organise the vast amount of data that researchers were amassing.

Lamm says: “I suppose when you have a software hammer [like I do], everything looks like a software nail, but it came about because we were working with six different platforms and when we showed this new one to collaborators, they said ‘wow, this would be useful in another research area that has nothing to do with Colossal’.” It is highly likely, he adds, that Colossal will spin out another company in the next 12 months.

Of course Lamm has received his fair share of ‘playing God’ accusations, but he claims the criticism is welcome and has enlisted prominent bioethicists to sit on Colossal’s advisory board. “We started with the mammoth because George was pretty far along on it, and there’s a large halo effect in how we can help elephant conservation. But anytime you do something big and bold, there is going to be pushback, and while positive feedback is awesome, you a learn a lot more from your critics,” he says. “The onus is on us to be transparent and to take informed critical feedback [on board] because we're not going to get everything right.”

A key reason the company’s website keeps expanding and a docuseries is now in the works is its ambition to inspire the next generation of scientists. “Until this business, I’d never had kids emailing me. They send me animal pictures they’ve drawn and ask, ‘when can I see this?’” he says, adding that the rate of innovation and invention at Colossal’s headquarter lab makes for a motivating workplace. “I was giving a lab tour to one of our investors recently and explaining, ‘this is the first time ever this has been done,’ and he interrupted with, ‘you know you’ve said that five times in the last hour?’ I hadn’t realised I was repeating myself but there are a lot of worldfirsts happening here.”

Recent headline achievements by Colossal scientists include the assembly of high-quality reference genomes for both the African and Asian elephant, confirming the latter as a 99.6 per cent match with its ice-age ancestor. Naturally talkative and energetic, Lamm finds it tough to stay tightlipped about the day-to-day wins of the lab and believes the public will be surprised with how soon his team can unveil some big scientific leaps. “I’ll receive negative feedback like ‘sure you’ve done this, but everyone knows that part isn’t possible’ and I have to stay quiet because we’re going through the peer review or patent process,” he says before adding conspiratorially, “but what I really want to say is ‘actually sir/ ma’am, we’ve already solved that’.”

Hear Ben Lamm in conversation at the first international edition of South by Southwest, which features talks and experiences spanning the realms of technology, music and screen across various Sydney venues from 15—22 October. sxswsydney.com

01. Ben Lamm holding a fossilised woolly mammoth tooth. Image: John Davidson 02. George Church exploring an ice cave at Pleistocene Park in Siberia, a home for de-extincted species. Image: Brendan Hall KAY & BURTON

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06 Paola Lenti Wave outdoor sunbed.

First designed by Paola Lenti’s long-time collaborator Francesco Rota 25 years ago, the Wave outdoor chaise longue exudes chic simplicity. Manufactured in Italy with a durable fixed-weave cover that is handwoven with rope cord, this latest edition features a star-like pattern inspired by the complex knots of Japanese tradition. Available in a choice of three pattern options—all in vibrant colourways—this iconic piece makes a striking, fun and functional addition to any poolside scene. POA. dedece.com

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Sarah Nedovic, Monument series. Pulling inspiration from the shapes and patterns of the figurative Spomenik monuments of her ancestral Eastern Europe, these handmade light pieces by Melbourne-based ceramic artist Sarah Nedovic tell a story of cultural nostalgia, artistic innovation and purposeful craftsmanship. Each flute is meticulously handcrafted from raw sculpting clay and left intentionally unglazed to create a warm ambience when lit, while the earthy texture acts as a counterbalance to each bold cylinder silhouette as the glow of light emanates from within.

POA. sarahnedovic.com

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THE SHORTLIST

Fendi x Piero Lissoni Ohe outdoor table.

This marble-topped coffee table (pictured in Verde Alpi) exemplifies sophisticated design. Inspired by the lush scenery of the Philippines, the table has been crafted with woven bamboo cane and rattan, while the sleek marble tabletop—available in a choice of finishes—features an engraved logo design. Marrying form and function, innovation and durability, it's sure to bring a touch of tropical charm to any outdoor space.

POA. palazzocollezioni.com.au 03.

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Monument wall light / Paola Lenti sunbed / Fendi Casa outdoor table / Herodotus shelving / Gaetano Pesce chair /

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Barbera Herodotus shelving unit.

With its understated profile and brooding good looks, this stylish and versatile shelving system by Melbourne furniture design studio Barbera brings true presence. Named after ancient Greece’s ‘father of history’, the Herodotus unit is formed around a sand-cast bronze or iron frame and comes in a range of customisable configurations and dimensions, with a choice of shelf materials from stone and tinted glass to American oak and blackened steel. Fabricated in Melbourne, this is classic design made to stand the test of time. POA. barberadesign.com

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Gaetano Pesce, Nobody’s Perfect chair. Celebrated Italian artist, architect, and industrial designer Gaetano Pesce once said: “I like beauty full of mistakes because we are human," and since its debut in 2002, Pesce's iconic Nobody's Perfect chair has endured to remain a beacon of perfectly imperfect abstract furniture design. His latest release introduces a mesmerising new edition, crafted from polyurethane resin, elevating Pesce's exuberant exploration of colour and showcasing his avant-garde artistry.

With Pesce having made his Australian debut with an exhibition at Melbourne gallery Neon Parc earlier this year, fans of his work can now purchase his extraordinarily unique and subversive pieces here in Australia. $25,000. neonparc.com.au

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The famously smiley Radek Sali is not one for management platitudes. Rather, he is evangelical about a style of compassionate leadership that unlocks the individual purpose and whole-life wellbeing of others. As chairman of Light Warrior, the B Corp-certified investment office he co-founded after presiding over the $1.7bn sale of vitamin maker Swisse Wellness in 2015, Sali sees selfcare and empathy as critical fuel for driving up social and environmental value as well as profit. “You need to love yourself before you can love others and then, in turn, be inspired to leave the world a better place,” he says. “The thing that keeps me awake at night is wondering how people feel working with us,” he adds. “Are they happy?

Do they feel like they have real purpose? If people feel inspired in the workplace we are going to have a much happier society, let alone higher performing businesses.”

Chasing the common good WELLNESS INDUSTRY TRAILBLAZER RADEK SALI SHARES HOW AN IMPACT-DRIVEN PHILOSOPHY HAS SUPERCHARGED HIS BUSINESS, INVESTMENT AND PERSONAL SUCCESSES. 01

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01. The resolutely positive Radek Sali smiles for the camera.

02. Melburnians gather en masse for the physical, mental and spiritual enrichment of a Wanderlust yoga class in the Royal Exhibition Building.

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This dedication to company culture as much as growth planning is what led to Swisse appearing on multiple Great Place to Work lists during Sali’s eight-year tenure as chief executive, wherein he expanded the product range from a couple of items to more than 300 and grew turnover 40-fold. He says his greatest satisfaction comes upon hearing from an employee’s loved one that they are a more contented version of themselves as a result of working with his firm. “I remember the first organisation I took note of growing up was Virgin because it looked creative and fun—everyone wanted to work there,” he recalls. “It always made logical sense to me that you get better [business] outcomes when you are driven by purpose and make that fun for others to be a part of.” Since then, he has co-owned a company with Richard Branson and is an Australasian representative for the legendary entrepreneur’s B Team social justice initiative.

HEALTH TO WEALTH In Sali’s experience, physical vitality and a calm mind are essential to meeting the high expectations of the corporate sphere.

He says: “We’re happier when we’re healthy, and the basis of that for thousands of years has been nutrition, mindfulness and movement; if I didn't have those three fundamentals, I'd never have been as successful as I have.” It is hardly surprising, then, that the local branch of US-born wellness event platform Wanderlust now falls under his purview, while he has also invested in electrolyte brand Hydralyte and health testing kit provider myDNA. Wanderlust Australia seems to represent an evolution of the mission Sali originated while at Swisse, this time selling plantbased supplements as well as ‘mindful living’ experiences. With the celebrity endorsement strategy he pioneered in the noughties having become industry standard (after effectively transforming a pharmacy label into an aspirational lifestyle brand), he believes consumer brands now need to meet a higher bar of authenticity.

“We try to build connections and uplift people with a family-friendly event format where alcohol is not a driver of the experience, and we’re seeing satisfaction ratings like 9.8 out of 10 because people are fundamentally moved,” he says. Wanderlust’s influencer roster includes the likes of Byron Bay-based surf musician Xavier Rudd and his wife, yogi Ashley Freeman-Rudd, who certainly seem to embody holistic living rather than simply perform it. The brand is also defined by its commitment to a lighter environmental footprint, using vitamin-D derived from fungi rather than sheep’s wool, for example, and omega-3 extracted directly from fast-growing algae rather than the overfished marine life that eat said algae.

A MATTER OF MINDSET When it comes to Australians’ mental health, Sali believes we could make gains on the Japanese—the world’s longest-living society—by taking time for meditation. He says: “When you learn to calm your mind and accept that the negative voice in your head is just another part of you [rather than your whole identity], you find you can give your all to a situation in the present rather than staying caught up in self-doubt or replaying the last difficult conversation you had.”

Of course, even Sali’s enviable career has not been free of risk or disappointments. In 2020, the George Calombaris-helmed restaurant empire in which he had a majority stake collapsed while the dust was still settling on an underpayment scandal that his team had uncovered and remedied. He believes it is important to talk openly about failure because not doing so can lead you to “freeze up and miss opportunities for future success”. He adds that many

businesses “need to act more like sporting teams where feedback is seen as a gift,” both in terms of congratulating staff on a job well done and commending those who have the bravery to call out their own mistakes so that others can learn from them.

In both his entrepreneurial and community commitments, Sali thinks deeply about the mark he is making. The La Trobe University scholarship that bears his family name seeks to help young Indigenous people in the Shepparton area to obtain a business degree without having to leave their hometown. He explains: “My father, who grew up in Shepparton, was the first Albanian to go to university here in Australia and that made a massive difference to his life, so we as a family wanted to support that legacy of education for underrepresented students.”

LIGHTING THE WAY His father, an integrative medicine pioneer, looms large when Sali reflects on his biggest inspirations and mentors. Another is Jane Tewson CBE, co-founder of major UK charity Comic Relief and Melbourne community development group Igniting Change, which he currently chairs. “Jane is the greatest social entrepreneur I've ever known, and as a society we should be supporting leaders like her better,” he says. “I’ve learned so much from the frontline heroes at Igniting Change… I’m now obsessed with fusing community work into purpose-led business so we can try shifting the dial on the greatest issues facing Australians.”

The principal avenues for Sali’s obsession include the impact funds held by Light Warrior offshoot Conscious Investment Management (CIM), and the philanthropic Lightfolk Foundation, which focuses largely on overcoming Indigenous disadvantage. In just four years, CIM has become one of the country’s major providers of social housing and specialist disability accommodation, and recently financed the return of 47,100ha of ancestral lands to traditional owners in south-west Queensland as part of a leading-edge carbon farming initiative. Needless to say, Sali is both an optimistic and solutions-driven member of the Australian Climate Leaders Coalition.

He says: “[At first] it proved hard to find impact-driven organisations that delivered commercial returns as well as social and environmental ones, but by really listening to the people who feel the issue you’re looking to solve and offering extra support [beyond that of a passive investor], you can start to make a difference.” CIM was recently listed among the region’s top 20 per cent of responsible investors for the second consecutive year by the Responsible Investment Association Australasia.

Currently splitting his time equally between commercial and nonprofit activities, Sali is clearly not content to sit on the sidelines. With Light Warrior’s riskier ventures, he seeks out a majority stake so he can refine company culture from the inside, since he previously found himself doing the same amount of work as a minority shareholder anyway. “You've got to give your all,” he says, adding, “you can't bring half your best and expect to see the best outcomes.” If his business highlights thus far are anything to go by, Sali should bottle and sell his own unique brand of energy and ambition. lightwarrior.com

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Record prices in Victoria and the Gold Coast, plus major prestige sales in Sydney, have confirmed the resilience of Australian luxury property in the face of economic headwinds. – By Lachlan Colquhoun

Australia’s east coast property market continues to march to its own strong drumbeat as foreign buyers and expats return, while local buyers defy the higher interest rate environment.

Mark Browning, head of Property Services Group at NAB, says that despite the prolonged increase in official rates over 2022, the prestige buying market has been “largely unaffected” compared to the broader market, and notes new sale price records in Victoria and Queensland. “When it comes to Australia’s most expensive properties, Sydney’s eastern suburbs and northern beaches, and Victoria’s Toorak, still lead the way,” Browning says. “The strong prices being achieved inthe prestige market are underpinned by a lack of supply, wider economic health, the return of homesick expats from places like Shanghai and Singapore, and the lifestyle appeal of Australia in general.”

One of the most closely watched listings of the year so far was Toorak trophy home Huntingfield, which achieved 10

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Melbourne’s third highest ever sales price and the eighth highest nationally for FY2022-23 when it transacted in June. According to Kay & Burton executive director Gowan Stubbings, the guiding range of $55-$60m was exceeded after multiple offers. “Homes like this just don't transact often,” Stubbings explains. “It was also the only true turnkey solution at this level in a long time because all the other big homes sold recently needed money spent on them. Since Covid, renovations have become increasingly difficult and very expensive, but Huntingfield was beautifully built and looked after.”

Designed by one of Australia’s oldest architecture firms, Bates Smart, the six-bed Albany Road residence boasts four-metre-high ceilings, two pools, an eight-car garage, and manicured gardens (complete with a waterfall) on a 3300sqm block. Stubbings says he was not surprised the property attracted strong interest from overseas buyers. “An Albany Road address is always going to pique the interest of anyone in that price range, both locally and

01. Period character blends artfully with ultra-modern conveniences at 14 St Georges Road, which Australian Home Beautiful magazine labelled ‘one of Toorak’s most dignified homes’ in 1931.

02. Approached through wrought-iron gates, Huntingfield is a mansion of impressive scale.

03. The Shakespeare Grove property features sonnet-worthy gardens.

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“Even purely from an investment perspective, buying a trophy home like that, with the land it offers, is not an opportunity that comes up often.”

GOWAN STUBBINGS KAY & BURTON

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certainly offshore," he explains. “We had a lot of expats enquire, and a huge number wanted to come and look at the property, including a number from mainland China intending to visit Australia specifically for that reason.”

Kay & Burton director Andrew Sahhar says offshore interest also characterised the sales campaign for Carinya on nearby Clendon Road. Spread over more than an acre, the restored three-level Spanish mission-style property sold for between $42-46m. “There are a lot of people relocating to Melbourne at the moment, so it’s no surprise that two of the five expressions of interest came out of Asia,” Sahhar explains. “But there are also families with multiple homes in Australia and overseas waiting in the wings to snap up generational homes like this.”

He adds that the top end of the Melbourne market is trading well heading into the warmer months, with multiple lifestyle properties equipped with tennis courts being readied for sale in the $20-30m bracket.

In September, expressions of interest opened for Karum on St Georges Road, a palazzo-style property complete with pool, tennis court and a Paul Bangaydesigned garden. If the guide price of $46-50m is achieved, the heritage-listed residence will join the state's top five most expensive properties—a list topped by 29 St Georges Road based on last year's $80m pricetag.

GLOBAL STANDING Hawthorn has been drawing cross-border attention too. In March, Avon Court on Shakespeare Grove pushed the suburb record above $40m. Having been on and off the market several times in recent years, the nine-bed mansion sold within the space of a week through Kay & Burton director Grant Samuel, who says headline-grabbing sales such as this have helped contribute to confidence in Australia’s prestige market.

“There’s huge demand in Hawthorn, particularly from overseas buyers at the moment,” Samuel says, adding that this vein of interest extends across the wider Boroondara area and Stonnington. “Foreign buyers are flocking here.

Of the 130 groups we saw at a recent auction, 80 per cent would have been international; it’s extraordinary.” Samuel suspects this trend will only continue: “Australia offers a safe culture, and our schooling is fantastic. We had a bit of a break like the rest of the world did but now we're seeing some really big sales.”

In this environment, Samuel adds, “$20m is the new $10m, it’s not the ridiculous number that it used to be.”

SCALING NEW HEIGHTS In Sydney, meanwhile, NAB’s Mark Browning notes the ceiling price for the year to date is around $70m, with a Queen Anne-style home in Bellevue Hill transacting at double the price paid just eight years ago. “Coupled with the record set at the end of 2022 of $130m for Uig Lodge in Point Piper, which superseded the $100m benchmark set four years earlier, this suggests buyers in the ultra-prime bracket have moved clear of Covid-era uncertainty.”

Other landmark sales included the $61.5m sale of a four-bed mansion on Kambala Road, Bellevue Hill, and the $69m sale of Mainhead at 49 Wunulla Road, Point Piper, which ranked among Sydney’s top 10 most expensive houses of all time. The highest apartment sale for the year thus far was in February, for a $26m residence in Crown's One Barangaroo complex.

New highs have also been reached in Brisbane, where the $20.5m sale of a 130-year-old riverfront property in New Farm broke the city’s prior record of $18.5m.

Queensland’s highest sale price for the year to date was achieved in September, with auction bids reaching $24.8m for the six-bed mansion Alston, set on a sprawling 3342sqm riverfront block at the Gold Coast.

Browning says: “Given the reported increasing level of enquiry supported by rebounding migration, the luxury segment is anticipated to continue outperforming the broader housing market.” He adds: “There is a strong prospect of new record prices being set this year, largely due to the lack of quality stock.”

01. A natural light-filled library is among the home comforts at Carinya in Toorak.

02. An arched portico lends the 1920s-era mansion a sense of permanence.

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SPREADING Homebody investors may love ASX blue-chip stocks and franked dividends, but could be missing out on opportunities in sectors such as artificial intelligence and renewables by ignoring offshore markets.

– By Tim Boreham

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When it comes to investing, Australians have tended to prefer the comfort of homegrown, dividend-paying blue-chip shares.

But should also cast our gaze further afield?

After all, a concentrated portfolio that is overly biased to a handful of companies may not deliver the strongest risk-adjusted returns.

As well as investing in a variety of asset classes such as property and fixed interest, diversification can also mean having an exposure to other geographies likely to perform differently to Australian shares. The Australian love affair with local equities— notably the 20 or so biggest ASX-listed shares—is driven by dividend yields that are higher than those in most other developed economy markets. According to research house Morningstar, a mere 10 companies account for 60 per cent of the dividends generated by the top 200 ASX companies.

These stocks are the Big Four banks, BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortescue Metals, Woodside Energy, Macquarie Group and Wesfarmers. Other stocks such as the supermarkets and Telstra pay reliable fully-franked dividends, but are in mature sectors with unexciting growth prospects.

“We often see that clients love Australian stocks because they are paying franking credits and that is really important for a lot of them,” says JBWere chief investment officer

YOUR Sally Auld. “There is definitely a bit more home country bias towards Australian equities; maybe a bit more than you would see in similar-sized countries.”

As a result, homebody investors also may miss out on superior performance elsewhere, and eschew exciting growth sectors such as technology, battery metals, renewable energy and biotechnology. With the support of a trusted Australian wealth manager such as JBWere, investors are able to dip a toe in these sectors indirectly through funds not accessible to the general public. Auld says: “An increasing number of people want exposure to the decarbonisation story, for which the bigger and better opportunities tend to be overseas, and we would typically bring those to our clients through a managed fund.”

Performance-wise, over the last 12 months the ASX/S&P 200 index has returned around 2 per cent, and a cumulative 12 per cent over the past five years. A measure of the top US companies, the S&P 500 index, has surged around 12 per cent and 45 per cent over these periods. While technology stocks wobbled in 2022, the tech-rich Nasdaq index has returned some 16 per cent over the year and a cumulative gain of 63 per cent over five years.

WINGS In some periods the Australian market will outperform, with much depending on the behaviour of the cyclical mining and financial sectors. But a multi-geography approach can hedge investors against a particularly lean year for an individual market. Auld refers to unsynchronised business cycles whereby “rather than everyone doing well together and then everyone being in a recession together, you might get economic and market outcomes across the world that are far more varied and less correlated”.

Paradoxically, the perceived safety of Australian shares may also turn out to be a costly false comfort if the economy of China—our most important trading partner— continues to sag. Morningstar points to the hidden ‘China problem’ of the three leading mining houses BHP (the biggest ASX-listed company), Rio Tinto and iron ore pure-play Fortescue Metals, which derives 90 per cent of its revenue from the Middle Kingdom.

The mining Big Three are exposed to falling demand for steel (and iron ore) from China’s struggling property sector, which also has knock-on effects for other key sectors of the Australian economy including property finance and manufacturing.

Heightened tensions over Taiwan and China’s aggressive territorial claims also mean that geopolitical risk looks closer to

home than in the past. “Geopolitical risks definitely are coming up a lot more in client conversations,” Auld says. “People are starting to think more about what it means for their portfolio and how—if at all—they can protect themselves against those sort of risks.”

So how do investors inject more geographic diversity into their portfolio—and to what degree? As with all asset allocation decisions, much depends on your age and risk appetite. At the more adventurous end, emerging markets such as Latin America promise heady returns, but also can result in steep losses given the boom-and-bust nature of the region’s economies. Attention has increasingly turned to India as its population and runaway economy threatens to usurp China’s.

Auld says US stocks have remained enduringly popular. After all, the US remains the world’s largest economy, the bastion of free enterprise and the home to the world’s biggest technology stocks. Local investors have limited choice when it comes to tech stocks on the ASX and none of them match the market-leading magnitude of Apple—the world’s biggest company—Alphabet (Google) or Amazon.

To surf the AI trend, investors really need an exposure to stocks such as Microsoft or the pure-play Nasdaq-listed

Nvidia, which now has a US$1 trillion-plus market worth.

Younger investors appear to be more willing to invest in offshore stocks, aided by the proliferation of discount online brokerages. According to the ASX 2023 Australian investor survey, 60 per cent of the 5519 respondents directly held Australian shares, while only 16 per cent directly held offshore shares. However, 25 per cent of ‘next-gen’ investors (with an average age of 21) invested in offshore equities, while only 43 per cent of them held local shares.

Auld says in a highly uncertain market climate, diversification is a “super-important” element to ensure capital is deployed in the right asset classes at the right time in order to maximise risk-adjusted returns in a portfolio. “While there’s no such thing as a free lunch in investing, portfolio diversification enables superior risk-adjusted returns compared to putting all your eggs in the one basket.”

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Shifts in the global economy and local market, climate change, and the complexities of the French taxation system are all placing pressure on Champagne’s little family estates.

But as many growers transition away from their own production, others are strengthening and expanding.

– By Tyson Stelzer

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Champagne: A delicate balance In the epicentre of the graceful slopes of Champagne’s fabled Côte des Blancs, there is perhaps no grower more privileged than the Péters family. Located in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger—the grand cru village more revered than any other—this estate is the proud custodian of a monumental 20 hectares of chardonnay spanning 60 vineyards.

Six generations of the same family have tended these vines, and the estate has bottled its own champagne since 1919. Current custodian Rodolphe Péters has a rockstar reputation in the world of champagne growers. Yet, he has observed a fundamental and disconcerting change in his world.

“We’ve had 15 to 20 years of the golden age of weather, which has increased the average quality of champagne, enabling the growers to achieve success and producers from lesser and even obscure villages to emerge,” Péters tells me as we taste a grand cru chardonnay from his cellar.

“In the past, it was much easier to make consistently good wine in the grand crus, so many of the growers became lazy, and producers in average villages were able to produce more interesting wines from lesser vineyards,” he explains. “But since 2016, when the weather turned, it was the end of this game. It was easy when we could pick good vintages in most years, but now it looks like we are back to just two or three good vintages each decade. The young gun growers have never experienced this, so it's not going to be easy for them forever.”

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The rise of the grower-producer has revolutionised this generation in Champagne. Recent decades have seen the little guy step forward to demonstrate that top champagne is no longer the exclusive realm of the big houses and the famous names. Champagne is not just oceanic blends from everywhere but single villages and individual vineyards, tended, crafted, matured, and presented lovingly to the world by the same pair of hands.

The champagne world has embraced top growers like EglyOuriet and Jacques Selosse, and prices have soared accordingly. But the dynamic is changing. One small grower told me in 2018 that he expected the next decade in Champagne to look very different, and that it will “not be possible for many of the small brands to survive”.

He continues the struggle to sustain his own family business in a highly respected premier cru on the Montagne de Reims, but many others have given up.

In 2022, 37 grower-producers followed a growing trend and closed down production to instead sell their grapes to other brands.

In 2008 there were more than 4600 grower-producers. Now there are fewer than 3700. Back then, growers sold 78.5 million bottles, almost one-quarter of all champagne production. Last year, this figure dropped to just 58.1 million, less than 18 per cent.

“The problem is that the French market is tough and very competitive,” says Maxime Toubart, president of Champagne’s

winegrower’s union. “Vineyards are increasingly dependent on the houses to sell their stocks. Because [the houses] have the means to sell the bottles in distant markets at high prices, they can afford to pay a lot for the grapes.”

Nicolas Chiquet, of respected grower-producer Gaston Chiquet in the village of Dizy, agrees. “Every year, we are losing sales to the big houses,” he says.

Chiquet is fortunate to be among the minority with global distribution. “Outside of France, we have less competition, and we have distribution through agents who are passionate about pushing growers.

But in France, we are alone; it is more difficult, and we have to work harder.”

Péters believes there has also been a change in how grower-producers are viewed in those international markets.

“In mature markets like the US, there was once a time when growers equated to top quality in the minds of consumers, journalists and sommeliers, so they imported something like 400 or 500 different growers,” he says. “And then they realised that it’s not because it’s a grower that it’s good, so now they are back to 350 growers.”

This scenario coincides with the retirement of many founders who produced their own grower champagnes for the first time. At the same time, Champagne’s large houses are seeking to increase production to meet global demand and are eager to actively engage growers to shore up supply. As the next generation takes over, many are recognising that strong grape prices and high demand for quality fruit from these négociant houses presents a more stable and compelling business opportunity. Champagne pays its growers the highest grape price in the world, now up more than 80 per cent on the price 15 years ago.

Former Veuve Clicquot chef de cave Dominique Demarville has been working on facilitating relationships between growers and champagne houses for some 20 years, and he says he’s noticing a shift in the ambitions of new growers. “We are creating a new generation of growers who don’t necessarily want to sell bottles but who want to be top growers and sell their fruit to the leading houses,” he says. “In the next 10 years, 35 per cent of growers will retire, and most will lease or sell their vines to other growers.”

This critical shift in grower champagnes has been amplified not only by economic forces but by the harrowing extremes of climate change. The vagaries of Champagne’s marginal climate and the diversity of its microclimates have long dictated a wine style dependent upon blending multiple vintages, varieties and crus. Ever-more dramatic extremes are taking their toll, and yields suffered bitterly in 2016 and even more in 2017 and 2021.

Benoît Gouez, chef de cave of Moët & Chandon, points out that this is another area in which smaller producers are disadvantaged.

“A small grower in one village has nothing to compensate for difficult weather,” he says. “Grower wines are very good, but by nature, the quality of champagne is uneven. The more grapes you can access, the more you can be consistent.”

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01. Egly-Ouriet's pinot-led 2011 vintage from 40-year-old vines in Ambonnay is considered one of the finest champagnes of that year. Image: Leif Carlsson 02. Some 34,000 hectares are under vine in Champagne.

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Champagne’s average grower now owns less than 0.7 hectares.

In a good harvest, this would facilitate production of just 7000 bottles. Larger growers are naturally more likely to bottle their own champagnes, but the average production of Champagne’s 3690 growers is a mere 15,800 bottles.

As vineyards are increasingly divided through inheritance, owners are forced to seek employment elsewhere. For Charles Heidsieck chef de cave Cyril Brun, this inevitably leads to a decline in producers’ ability to navigate the volatility of the work. “We have observed that with the new generation, sometimes they have lost the soul of a vigneron,” he says. “They lose involvement with the technical side of viticulture; not so important in an easy harvest, but critical in vintages like 2018.”

Jérôme Prévost is one of Champagne’s most celebrated growerproducers, producing just 13,000 bottles from a 2.2-hectare vineyard he inherited from his grandmother in 1987. Although his wines are in high demand and sell for respectable prices worldwide, such a small production may have proven insufficient to sustain his livelihood. In 2017, frost wiped out 80 per cent of his harvest, and he relinquished his grower-producer credentials to be reincarnated as a négociant in order to purchase fruit and grow his production.

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01. The hillside village of Mutigny is an ideal base from which to explore the Marne Valley and Côte des Blancs.

02. Celebrated winemaker Francis Egly, who took the helm at Egly-Ouriet in 1982.

Image: Thomas Iversen

More and more of Champagne’s most celebrated growers are following suit, though not all for the same reason. The acclaimed 9.5-hectare estate of Bérêche et Fils recently joined the négociant world, to create the flexibility not only to buy from growers but, surprisingly, to purchase more vineyards.

For the De Sousa family in the fabled grand cru of Avize, the decision to become a négociant came for a very different reason: France’s taxation system. As third-generation grower Erick De Sousa prepared to pass the estate on to his three children, he was faced with the realities of the country’s inheritance tax—a threat more crippling than global economics and climate change.

In France, children are stung with a 45 per cent inheritance tax—one of the highest taxes of its kind in the world. A generation ago it was possible to pay off inheritance tax in a single harvest. Today, Champagne is the highest-value appellation viticultural land on earth, and its top grand crus are now fetching up to €3m (AU$5m) per hectare.

The vineyards and bottles of the little family estate of De Sousa alone must be worth well in excess of €30m. It would take a lifetime to pay off the tax on such an inheritance. The more than slightly ironic twist of switching from grower to négociant thus proved the only way to uphold the business in the family name.

We are now at a critical juncture in the evolution of the Champagne growerproducer. The years to come will no doubt see more growers adapt and transition their businesses. But, while many smaller and less-recognised estates will return to selling their fruit to négociants, Dominique Demarville predicts that top growers like Egly-Ouriet—widely considered Champagne’s top grower—will flourish.

Francis Egly (of Egly-Ouriet) says the quality expected from grower-producer cuvées will drive the market. “In the past it was very easy for small producers to sell champagne, but today, a lot have trouble finding their place in the market,” he says. “The new generation of champagne lovers expect very good quality from small producers, and those who make mediocre quality will find it increasingly difficult to sell their production.”

Of course, this is not the worst thing. It would be no catastrophe for Champagne’s lesser growers to redirect their fruit to the négociant houses, shoring up overall supply while sustaining the livelihoods of more growers, with market prices incentivising better farming. And there is no doubt that the very best grower-producers, well established and well-loved across the champagne domain, will continue, against all odds, to strengthen their rightful place among the great wine estates of the world.

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ARTIST IMPRESSION

Life through a remarkable lens A rare opportunity for a new era of Toorak living awaits at The Brookville.

A collection of ten artfully curated residences that together elevate the true essence of a remarkable address. Behind its doors, discover an evolution of style, culture and comfort never indulged in before.

RESERVE YOUR RESIDENCE

Andrew Sahhar 0417 363 358 asahhar@kayburton.com.au

Robert Li 0413 725 369 rli@kayburton.com.au

T H E B R O O K V I L L E .C O M. A U

PROJECT TEAM

EXQUISITE DISSONANCE

Acclaimed Iranian-Australian photographer Hoda Afshar on art in service of life, activism, and the camera as an active participant in her vast and varied career.

– By Anna Snoekstra

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Hoda Afshar photographed

by Timothy Johannessen

When it came time to name her major exhibition for The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Iranian-born, Melbournebased photographer Hoda Afshar struggled.

How to find a title that would hold so many different projects under its umbrella? The exhibition covers 19 years of work; images and video that range from black and white documentary-style photographs of illegal bathhouses in Iran, to Warhol-esque hyper-coloured studio shots littered with pop culture iconography. Afshar found the words in a line from Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s poem Milk, which read: ‘a curve is a straight line broken at all its points so much / of being alive is breaking’.

“I changed and shortened it to A Curve is a Broken Line,” Afshar says. “It captures vulnerability and resilience at the same time, which are qualities I try to capture in all my works, especially the ones that are about different communities and other people's stories.”

Afshar’s most recent work, In Turn, isn’t about other people—it is supremely personal. Commissioned by AGNSW for A Curve is a Broken Line, it explores her experience of watching the Iranian uprising from afar, a moment shared by many Iranian women living abroad. When Afshar and I speak, she’s clearly exhausted. It’s five in the afternoon on a Friday and she’s been rushing from one commitment to the next in the lead-up to the exhibition opening.

But when she speaks about the creation of these photos, her whole demeanour changes; her gesticulation animates, and her face lights up.

The photographs feature women standing in front of blank skies, braiding each other's hair and holding white doves. Hair braiding is a statement of resistance, linked to the feminist movement in Kurdistan and also rooted in Black American history and Asian cultures. Afshar wanted to acknowledge the universal aspects of this as well as the specificity to the images coming out of Iran, where women are coming together to protest for their right to choose whether or not to wear the veil. The uprising was sparked by the brutal death in custody of 22-year-old Masa Ahmini shortly after she was arrested by Tehran’s ‘morality police’ for being in public without a hijab.

“A lot of people don't know the visual language that comes into the images you

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01. Pigment photographic print of Untitled #4 from the In Turn series (2023).

02. Untitled #10 from the same series.

03. Untitled #2.

All images: © Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

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see coming from Iran, the performance of the body, and the fight for freedom, and the unity between the women who wear the hijab and those that don’t,” Afshar explains.

“You see them on the streets of Iran. The woman with the hijab is plaiting a woman's hair that is refusing to wear it. [The women are] documenting all of this for the gaze of an audience; they know that people are looking.”

It was harrowing for Afshar to witness the courage of those protesting across Iran from afar. Norway-based non-profit Iran Human Rights (IHR), which is tracking the protests, said in April that Iranian security forces had killed more than 500 people in their crackdown. Afshar tells me about the restlessness of this time. She was glued to

her phone, wanting to be there to fight with her people as well as connecting and sharing information with the Iranian diaspora here in Australia to explore ways to raise awareness. “As someone who grew up in Iran, I knew the level of courage it takes for people to do what they were doing,” Afshar says. “It was inspiring, moving and very emotional, and it was giving us all hope. But at the same time, the excessive killing and violence by the Iranian government that was performed in front of the world's eyes was bringing mourning and despair. The contrast between hope and despair was at the heart of that period for me and I wanted to capture that.”

The images themselves are like visual

poems, with symbols exploring these conflicting emotions. The women braiding each other's hair signify resilience and mutual care. The white doves are a symbol of grief and anguish, as in Iran, white doves were released into the sky for every protester death.

Afshar shot the series on an old largeformat four-by-five camera, the type of which is typically only used in a controlled studio setting. She attended workshops to learn how to use it. The images took a long time to create, with Afshar taking them from under a blanket while the subjects held the poses. The trained doves were another variable, as was the harsh, wet, and windy weather. Rather than resisting these volatile factors in her images, Afshar embraces them.

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Untitled #88 from the Speak the Wind series (2021).

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Untitled #2 from the same series.

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“There's this element of chance and accident that comes into the work. The camera has its own personality and characteristics that you cannot control fully.”

This tension between the staged and the documented has become an essential part of Afshar’s work. Looking back at her teenage years in Tehran sheds some light on these preoccupations. She was initially interested in becoming an actress, but fell in love with photography the moment she created her first image for a high school class. “I went to a park near my house, and I photographed a water fountain. When we developed our films at school, I remember the excitement I felt in the darkroom when I saw [the image] in the red light appearing on the paper. It's a cliche story of a photographer, that you fall in love with the magic of the darkroom, but I was so happy. I don't think I’d ever felt that happy.”

Still, her first choice for university was theatre, but she didn’t get in. Photography was her second choice. “I spent a lot of time hanging out with the theatre students and documenting their plays. In fact, everything I've been doing with my photography is a form of staging reality and performing reality.”

Afshar grew up next door to wellknown Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Kazemi, who documented the events leading up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, as well as other

conflicts across the world. While Afshar was studying, Kazemi took her under his wing, introducing her to foreign war photographers when they came to Tehran. She was initially focused on the documentary genre and at university, was taught to approach her subject objectively as a way of finding truth. But this methodology didn’t sit right. “You treat everything like an object, basically, and I couldn't do that. I unconsciously was against the idea.”

Afshar made a series of photographs of Tehran’s illegal underground parties, later titled Scene. She didn’t want to take photographs of her friends without their knowledge, even though she understood that by telling them, they’d be performing for the camera. Instead, they became active participants, collaborators. Afshar didn’t tell her teachers that the images were staged, for fear of failing the course. It made her feel like she was cheating. “Years later,” she recalls, “I realised that what I [then considered] cheating was the methodology that I wanted to consciously use. I started believing in the process, and I made it bolder and louder and I openly spoke about it.”

Migrating to Australia in 2007 changed her approach further. The photographs she was making in Iran were in the documentary style, depicting people ‘performing’ their lives. But her move to Australia made her more curious about

dissecting the structures that produce marginality, than in documenting the margins themselves. “I spent the first couple of years […] going out with my camera, but I couldn't find anything to photograph because I didn't know anything about the culture and history,” she says. This led her, instead, to the studio. Afshar made her first studio series, Under Western Eyes, across 2013 and 2014 as a response to the narrow representation of Islamic women in Western media, showing colourful pop-art style images of women wearing hijabs, Marilyn wigs and Minnie Mouse ears.

She now embraces these different approaches, calling herself “two different photographers”. In Australia, she spends a lot of time researching and developing the skills she needs to create a specific and deliberate visual aesthetic. In Iran, she carries a camera, documenting and collecting images first and later putting them together to decide what she wants to say.

In both approaches, the interaction between life and art is fundamental.

“There’s a famous saying that life is more important than art,” she says. “For me, art should be at the service of life. I would say it’s a form of activism. I have developed trust in the power of beauty and in the language of art contributing to change by drawing people in and making them ask certain questions. It’s hard to make people KAY & BURTON

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engage with something; they need to feel something.” Afshar believes art has the capacity to move the viewer past sympathy towards indignation and the need to act.

Taken from her well-known 2018 series Remain, Afshar’s Bowness Photography Prize-winning portrait of Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani cemented her belief in the potential of art as activism. She travelled to Manus Island to capture the photographs and made short films of the stateless men living there in detention under Australia’s immigration policies, including Boochani. “It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life,” she remembers. “Even when I was standing there, I couldn't believe that I was there.

Making the work that we made together in those conditions, and the trust that those individuals put in the work, still to this day, every time I think about it, it brings tears to my eyes. But the noise that that work made, made me believe that art has a lot more power than I thought it had. It made me trust it even more.”

As Afshar told me, she wanted to highlight the vulnerability and resilience in her work when choosing the title for A Curve is a Broken Line. Pairing that with the interplay of artistic inquiry and activism that drives her, and the mix of documentation and staging, she has created a body of work that is powerful but not always loud. The hushed courage of In Turn quietly manifests these dissonant concerns, and it’s beautiful.

Hoda Afshar's A Curve is a Broken Line will be on display at The Art Gallery of New South Wales until 21 January 2024. artgallery.nsw.gov.au

01. Refugee writer Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island, from the Remain series (2018).

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P ortrait #3 from the series In the exodus, I love you more (2014—17).

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01. The Debussy Room, where the French composer stayed in the late 1880s, as restyled by India Mahdavi. Image: François Halard 02. The villa's richly decorative facade makes it an exemplar of the mannerist style. Image: Daniele Molajoli

IN THE DREAM HOUSE Words GRACE O'NEILL

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A remarkable restoration project is transforming the historic Villa Medici—site of the French Academy in Rome—with the help of some of the most exciting creatives and designers in Europe. The dialogue between past and present has never yielded more enchanting results.

In 1576, a 27-year-old Italian nobleman by the name of Fernando I de’ Medici purchased a palazzo in central Rome and set about restoring it. His goal was to assert his Tuscan family’s standing among the broader Italian nobility, and he spared no expense commissioning extravagant frescoes, purchasing endless art for the villa’s walls, and creating grand gardens on the grounds’ seven hectares, filled with pines, cypresses, and oaks. The result was the eponymous Villa Medici, a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture that became, under Medici’s leadership, a thrumming cultural nexus hosting the era’s greatest minds (Galileo stayed there multiple times), and a museum

housing the art of Europe’s great masters.

Two centuries later, the Medici line had died out, and during the Napoleonic wars, the villa fell into the possession of Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte had been looking for a permanent home in Rome for the French Academy, an institution created in the 17th century to patronise emerging French artists by sponsoring years-long residency programs in the Eternal City. Villa Medici proved the perfect fit and remains the home of the French Academy to this day.

Since then, the villa has undergone many restorations and renovations under the leadership of successive artistic directors, most memorably the French

painter Balthus, who put the villa through painstaking renovations in the 1960s.

“Balthus took on great responsibility for Villa Medici,” explains Pierre-Antoine Gatier, chief architect for French-owned historic monuments “He tried to restore the atmosphere of a great Roman palace.

He restored the terracotta tiled floors, he decided to paint all the walls, cornices, and vaults in a very subtle palette of beige and ochre.” In this way, the Villa Medici is less a historical monument and more a living, breathing organism, in an ever-evolving dialogue with the art of its time.

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Sam Stourdzé, who was appointed by Emmanuel Macron in 2020 and has, since 2022, been unveiling his own renovations of the property through his “re-enchantment” program. “With Balthus and later Richard Peduzzi as creative directors, they took direct responsibility for the redesign,” Stourdzé explains. “We decided to take a more inclusive approach.” This new strategy is a three-step, multi-year project for which top creatives from Italy and France are commissioned to re-imagine the villa, room by room.

It started with Fendi. Kim Jones and Silvia Venturini Fendi—the brand’s artistic director of couture and womenswear, and artistic director of accessories and menswear, respectively—were tasked with refurbishing the villa’s six sprawling reception rooms. “The work required more than two years of research,” Stourdzé says. “[Jones and Fendi] delved into the history of Villa Medici to create a new setting, a new decoration.” The end result was unveiled last December, a remarkable re-imagining that

blended modernism—bold pops of colour, contemporary artworks, metallic accents— with lovingly restored details from the villa’s history. Jones and Fendi commissioned custom handknotted carpets from recycled French wool to match the patinas painted by Balthus in the 1960s.

Paris-based designer Noé DuchaufourLawrence created tables for the Salon de Lecture and the Salon Bleu made of giant, interlocking slabs of marble intended to look like the cobblestones of Via Appia, the oldest road in Rome. In the Petit Salon, the hero piece is a large, curving orange-rust velvet sofa developed by Milan-based designer Toan Nguyen and produced by Fendi Casa, while fraternal design duo Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec created sculptural armchairs that sit in neat rows in the sprawling Grand Salon. These pieces complement the villa’s new selection of contemporary art, sourced from the Mobilier National, a French state service dedicated to the conservation and restoration of decorative arts. With a focus

on women artists, the new salons feature pieces by Louise Bourgeois, Sheila Hicks, Aurelie Nemours, Sonia Delaunay and Alicia Penalba, alongside 17th-century tapestries that were lovingly restored by 1906-founded workshop Bobin Tradition. “We have this kind of dialogue between ancient statues and contemporary tapestries, contemporary furniture, and site-specific creations,” explains Hervé Lemoine, president of Mobilier National. “We mix styles and eras and combine them in a happy marriage.”

The second chapter in Stourdzè’s reenchantment project was unveiled in April this year: a collaboration with the buzzy Iranian-French architect and designer India Mahdavi. Mahdavi, whose past projects include London restaurant Sketch and the Monte Carlo Beach Club in Monaco, was commissioned for the art direction of six rooms in the villa, including the Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici’s original 16thcentury apartments, and three guest rooms named after iconic guests of the house: the

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01. Salon Lili Boulanger honours the first women to win the Prix de Rome composition prize.

02. Linear paintings and marble panelling are offset by Mahdavi's green Bishop stools and a colourblock rug in the Room of the Muses.

03. The graphics on a new four-poster tie in with the floor pattern in The Galileo Room.

Images: François Halard

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Lili Boulanger Salon, the Debussy Room, and the Galileo Room. Mahdavi’s project centred around the concepts of geometry and colour, creating a look she later described as “pop Renaissance”.

“It was very humbling to think of intervening in Villa Medici,” Mahdavi says.

“It was challenging to understand how to work without distorting the villa but joining its story. It’s a kind of magic being in these rooms.” The importance was to “create the utmost comfort with the minimal number of items”, so Mahdavi kept the same walls and furniture that Balthus had installed in the 1960s. Her studio reworked furniture from the 17th and 18th centuries using an interlocking geometric motif in various bold colourways. A 16th-century fresco by the mannerist painter Jacopo Zucchi was restored as part of the project, and French artisan brand Maison Trèca was tapped to create handmade beds, all of which were designed in Paris.

The final stage of the project is currently underway. The most collaborative of the three phases, stage three involved an open call to contemporary designers, architects

and artists to pitch original concepts for how to transform the villa’s nine guest rooms.

Judged by a jury overseen by Stourdzé, the process saw the first two guest rooms commissioned in early 2023. The first is a project called ‘Camera Fantasia’, by Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard of Studio GGSV in Paris; Italian-born, New Yorkbased architect Riccardo Cavaciocchi of Paper Factor; and French artist Matthieu Lemariè,—who will transform the interior space of a room through the use of decorative paint and paper pulp. The second, ‘Studiolo’, is a project run by Sébastian Kieffer and Léa Padovani of Paris-based Studio Pool, together with Romain Boulais and Félix Lévêque of Atelier Veneer, which will focus on wooden cladding, monochrome colour, and intricate wall decorations. The remaining seven rooms will be unveiled over the coming year.

The villa is a popular location for tourists, thanks in part to its prime location, right next to the gardens of the Villa Borghese, but its primary function remains as a haven for artists. The Academy organises various residencies for French-

speaking artists, authors, and researchers throughout the year, offering recipients the chance to spend anywhere between a couple of months and several years immersed in the rich artistic history of both the villa itself and the city it overlooks. In this sense, Villa Medici’s raison d’etre is simple: it serves the art impulse. For Pierre-Antoine Gatier, this desire—to embolden a new generation of creative thinkers—has driven every element of the re-enchantment process. “There is a dialogue between the preservation of history and contemporary creation,” he says. “It was Balthus’ great dream that his intervention would benefit creation—by the residents who were there then, and now by us, 30, 40 or even 50 years later.”

Room reservations are requested at least two months in advance. villamedici.it

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Culinary inheritance

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– By Leanne Clancey

Two of Australia's most celebrated restaurant families reveal how inherited values enable them to bring heart and soul to the table year after year.

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01. Diners at Neil Perry's restaurant Margaret in Double Bay. 02. Neil Perry and his daughter Josephine Perry pictured at Margaret.

03. Sashimi of Paspaley pearl meat with white soy ponzu—an example of Perry's long-held dedication to sustainable Australian produce.

Images: Petrina Tinslay

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For Neil Perry OAM, the journey to becoming a chef didn’t start with an apprenticeship. It didn’t even start in the kitchen; in truth, it began much earlier. “I had no idea at the time, but growing up, I was being steeped in something very special, thanks to my parents. It was happening throughout my entire life, without me even realising it.”

Raised in inner-west Sydney by his parents, the late Lesley (Les) and Margaret Perry, the veteran chef says it was time spent with his father in his youth that perhaps proved most seminal. A butcher who supplied many Sydney restaurants during the 1970s and 80s, forming close relationships with chefs and restaurateurs from a range of backgrounds, Les exposed his son to diverse food cultures, providing him with the nuanced understanding of seasonality and quality in fresh produce that have been hallmarks of his career as a chef.

Through the exercise of tagging along on his dad’s delivery jobs, overhearing detailed conversations between chef and supplier, and sitting down to eat in the Chinatown restaurants that his dad supplied, Perry unwittingly gained an education that would later inform his trademark East-West fusion approach and foreground his role as one of the country’s most innovative and influential chefs.

“I didn't think about it too much until I was writing my first cookbook, Rockpool,” Perry reflects. “Back in 1994, when I was doing the manuscript, I started thinking about what had drawn me to restaurants and cooking. It was at this moment that it really dawned on me that [my parents] were 100 per cent the reason that I was doing what I was doing—and approaching things the way that I was.”

Les Perry, an avid fisherman who kept a productive garden of vegetables, fruit trees and chickens at the family home, loved to cook, and instilled a sense of curiosity in his son from an early age, whipping up Chinese, Indian and Greek dishes at home in an era when family dinners rarely ventured beyond the customary bland meat and overcooked three veg.

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The maternal warmth of Neil’s mother Margaret, meanwhile, was felt through the inclusive open-door policy of the convivial Perry family home, which he says regularly hosted friends and family for gatherings. “My mum always extended hospitality, warmth and generosity,” Perry says. “Our home was open to many. It was always a meeting place for extended family.”

Today, with a five-decade-long career that has attracted countless industry awards, and seen him bestowed with an Order of Australia for his contributions to the hospitality industry, it’s clear that Perry’s parents’ influence has remained a constant guiding presence—and his recollections of them are grounded in loving sincerity and deep appreciation.

“I am a complete product of my parents,” he says. “When I was young, I was always dreaming big. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew that I enjoyed encouraging and leading— that all came from the confidence my mum and dad gave me.”

In 2021, Perry translated this appreciation into a significant gesture of acknowledgement by naming his newest restaurant— Margaret, in Sydney’s Double Bay—after his late mother, who passed away in 2015. “At this restaurant, and the ones that came before it, the spirit of hospitality my parents engendered in me is really what KAY & BURTON

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runs things,” Perry shares. “From Mum, it’s that great sense of warmth, welcoming and family; and from Dad, just the sheer understanding of seasonality and great produce.”

Running front of house operations at Margaret is the family’s next generation— Perry’s daughter Josephine. She has been in the industry since she left school and, like Perry, shadowed her dad on the job from a young age. “I was on the phone at Rockpool taking reservations at eight years old,” she laughs. “I’ve just always loved the atmosphere of restaurants, and growing up at Rockpool really shaped me. The restaurant was family; we would all sit down to eat meals together before service and it felt like I was growing up with all these big brothers and sisters [the staff],” she recalls.

For Perry, who exited his role as culinary director and ambassador of the Rockpool Dining Group in 2020, returning to basics with a family-run business has brought new meaning to his work. “This is the first time I’ve been in business where the family owns the whole business—no external partners,” Perry explains. “I really admire what Josephine does. She was so close with my mother, and she is a real pillar of what this restaurant stands for.”

Indeed, the family involvement does not stop there. Perry’s wife Samantha is closely involved in the business, while youngest daughters Macy and Indi (aged 19 and 17 respectively) stay busy helping out on weekends polishing cutlery, along with

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some of their friends, all locals from the area. “We have this tribe of kids doing shifts every week,” Perry says, enthusiastically.

“We’re training the next generation.”

The spirit of his mum’s warmth and inclusiveness clearly lives on in the work culture at Margaret, a sentiment that is not lost on the chef. “It’s that same philosophy of care, which is exactly what we wanted this business to be about.”

Likewise, the menu at Margaret reads like a rollcall of old friends, with ‘Luke’s kingfish’ sitting alongside ‘Ben’s coral trout’ and ‘Heidi’s bigeye tuna’—a testament to the genuine personal connections Perry has made with suppliers and the reverence and respect he holds for their role in the broader ecosystem of his business’ success. “It was at Barrenjoey House in 1983 that I first started writing the name of some suppliers on the menu, and I followed that through at Rockpool and later businesses,” Perry says. “It’s always been important to me. At Margaret, we list our suppliers by their first name because they truly are friends and colleagues and family.”

He continues: “I'm [less interested in the price] of a product than I am in understanding how it has been treated. I taste it, I see the difference, so I want to make sure that I can support the supplier or farmer or fisherman to make a living out of looking after my product,” he explains. Forty years after he first began publicly citing suppliers on his menus—a practice largely unheard of at the time—the gesture is now

much more prevalent in the industry, a shift Perry says he is thrilled to see. “Hopefully I've set a benchmark there in terms of how other restaurateurs relate to their suppliers and producers.”

At fine dining institution Grossi Florentino, which has sat nestled in the leafy top end of Melbourne’s Bourke Street for close to 100 years, the notion of legacy looms large—as much for the family now running the near-century old business as for the history-filled walls of the building itself.

Established in 1918 as a wine bar by Samuel Wynn (founder of Wynn’s wines) and later trading as Cafe Florentino from 1928, Florentino is cited as Melbourne’s oldest restaurant. Melbourne chef Guy Grossi took the helm of the three-tiered business (which comprises the upstairs restaurant, and the less formal Grill and Cellar Bar downstairs) in 1999, bringing with him the cultural pride and passion for good food passed down from his father Pietro, who arrived in Australia from Italy in the 1950s.

Back in 1960, Pietro Grossi—then a newly arrived immigrant who worked as a cook in Melbourne’s CBD—had one of his first drinks at Florentino’s Cellar Bar. It was a rare sanctuary of European culture for a man finding his feet in a foreign land.

Years later, as an apprentice chef in his teens, Guy visited Florentino for the first time, and recalls being captivated by the same old-world atmosphere that his father so appreciated.

Fast-forward a few decades and the iconic venue has been in the family for almost 25 years and become the flagship of a broader stable of hospitality businesses under the Grossi umbrella. Balancing the expectations of a long-established and deeply loyal customer base with his own ambitions as a chef, Guy steadily cemented a reputation as a pioneer of rigorously seasonal regional Italian cuisine in the Florentino kitchen, at a time when such concepts were largely uncultivated in Australia.

Today, the Grossi empire is a deeply family affair, with Guy’s adult children Carlo and Loredana running front of house and marketing respectively; his sister Elizabeth the business’ co-owner and director; Liz’s husband, Chris Rodriguez, executive chef of the Grossi Florentino kitchen; and Guy’s wife Melissa managing finances. The enduring influence of Guy and Liz’s late parents, Pietro and Marisa Grossi, still guides the family in both the food that is served and the warmth with which guests are treated, the latter being a legacy of Marisa’s own legendary spirit of hospitality.

“Discipline was one of the cornerstones of [Pietro’s] whole life approach,” Carlo says. “He was a very regimented man with a strong work ethic. So much of what we do is based around the lessons that my grandmother and grandfather taught the family.”

He says Marisa played an integral role in the life of the business until her death in late 2022. “Right up until then, she was still pottering around the place.

She would come in and have lunch with the girls.

She’d hang out with Liz and interact with staff and, you know, give her opinion. She loved giving her opinion,” he laughs.

Looking back, Carlo recounts impressions of his first visit to the restaurant, aged 12, when his father had just taken over. “I remember coming here and thinking it was quite lovely and special,” he recalls.

After that, it was a place where school holidays were spent helping out in the kitchen. “One of my earliest memories is being in the upstairs kitchen with Dad, blanching spinach and throwing it in iced water.”

As time went on, the restaurant became an anchor for the family. “In the early years, I don't think there was a minute of service where either Liz, Guy or Chris weren't here. And the rest of the family just gravitated in,” Carlo says. “It became our family hub. We’d be here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

We lived and breathed the place, we still very much do.” And despite the fact that the family’s empire has expanded to comprise multiple venues in various locations, the original has remained ground zero.

“Even with our other businesses, we've got a place that is home. Whenever people ask me where I spend most of my time, it's here.”

It's natural to assume that with Guy having followed in his father’s footsteps, his son might have felt a sense of duty to continue the tradition, but for Carlo, entering the family business was more about passion than pressure.

“Growing up, Dad always told my sister and I that it was totally our choice what we did with ourselves,” Carlo explains. “At one stage, I was

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01. Three generations of the Grossi family, pictured outside Grossi Florentino in Melbourne.

02. Artworks in the Grossi Florentino 'mural room' are now classified by the National Trust.

03. Cafe Florentino (now Grossi Florentino) pictured in 1963. Image courtesy of City of Melbourne Art and Heritage Collection. Image by Alan Bates

looking at different career paths, but once you get the bug and start working in the business and experience the act of hospitality it’s hard to stop. Then if you move away from it, it's something you really miss”. Carlo says that while he initially spent more time in the kitchen, he was eventually lured by the restaurant floor. “I really just enjoyed that whole human element of the front. Making other people feel nice makes you feel really good. You get a buzz off it.”

As Florentino approaches its 100th year and the Grossi family its 25th year as custodians of the site, what might the future hold? “When you go to Italy, it’s not unusual to meet fourthgeneration restaurateurs whose family has been in the same place since for over 100 years. They really wear that heritage like a badge of honour— it’s an incredible thing to see,” Carlo says. “I hope we're still here in 20 or 30 years’ time, still producing something special, still contributing to the city’s magic, and continuing to help people make the kind of beautiful memories they’ve been making here over so many years.” margaretdoublebay.com grossi.com.au

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FASHI A LEG

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Photography SASKIA WILSON

Words LUCIANNE TONTI

OVER HER LIFE, CARLA ZAMPATTI’S PASSION AND INFLUENCE EXTENDED BEYOND FASHION INTO WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT AND ADVOCACY OF MULTICULTURALISM AND THE ARTS. HERE, WE LEARN HOW THE BRAND’S NEW CUSTODIANS ARE EMBRACING THE FUTURE WITH RENEWED CREATIVITY WHILE KEEPING ZAMPATTI'S VALUES ALIVE.

IONING GACY

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01. Raven brocade with satin dress from Winter 2014.

02. The eponymous designer in 1979.

Images: Carla Zampatti archives

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In 1981, a defiant then-38year-old Carla Zampatti told the National Press Club: “I do believe that most women in whatever level of job they have achieved are usually more intelligent [and] more capable than their male counterpart.”

At the time of the address, her brand had been growing 40 per cent each season, and she had recently been awarded the inaugural Qantas/Bulletin Australian Business Woman of the Year. But just over a decade earlier, a bank manager had refused to loan her capital to get started because she was a divorced woman with a young child, and he didn’t believe she would stay in business.

When she passed away in April 2021, Zampatti was Australia’s longest working fashion designer. Over the course of five decades, she opened 28 boutiques under her eponymous label. She was a founding member of Chief Executive Women (an organisation representing prominent and influential women leaders in the business world), the first female chair of SBS, and served on many boards, including that of the Sydney Dance Company, Westfield Holdings and the Australian Multicultural Foundation. She counted among her clientele some of Australia’s most powerful women: Julia Gillard, Ita Buttrose and Quentin Bryce, to name a few.

The Press Club address, which would have been just as resonant if it was delivered today (and incidentally, can be listened to in full at the National Library of Australia), reveals an incredible mind working across history, psychology, style, feminism and finance. The address underscores the depth and breadth of the

legacy Zampatti leaves behind as a champion of women, multiculturalism and the arts.

Over the 40-minute speech, Zampatti reveals insights into the impacts of lowered tariffs on the Australian garment industry and rather depressingly foresees the job losses and overproduction they would cause. She describes ambition and drive as the forces that bring businesses to life.

She campaigns for women to participate in the workplace and handles questions about balancing motherhood and her career with charm and wit. She says predicting the elusive desires of the marketplace is “the best qualification one can have as a designer”. This ability to step inside her customers’ hearts and minds, to give light to their hopes and form to their dreams, was perhaps Zampatti’s greatest talent.

Reflecting on her legacy, the late designer's son and CEO of Carla Zampatti Pty Ltd, Alex Schuman, describes his mother’s ability to make women “feel beautiful and powerful and feminine, but confident in whatever they are doing,” as something that comes up repeatedly in conversations with people who wore her clothes. “She was a phenomenal designer who really had a finger on the pulse for contemporary women,” he says. “I think that was the X factor.”

Her keen insights into the wants and needs of women are impossible to separate from her work as an advocate for women’s empowerment, liberation and participation in the workforce. She found success during a time of immense change for women. In the 1970s and 80s, women were entering the workforce and attempting to juggle the competing expectations of freedom and equality with KAY & BURTON

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marriage and family. Zampatti understood the power of an outfit to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality, to give women the opportunity to feel like the leader they hoped to be. She created a new kind of wardrobe that made women feel safe to enter the boardroom but did not shy away from the power of beauty.

“For women trying to succeed in their careers when they're competing with men, dress is very important,” she said to the Press Club. “The body in the garment must be feminine and comfortable.

The line must be flattering. It must be a memorable garment.”

Karlie Ungar has been the creative director of Carla Zampatti since July 2021. Unsurprisingly, the designer—who previously worked at Saba and Veronika Maine—feels the weight of responsibility to carry Zampatti’s legacy forward. She hopes to continue producing garments that make women feel confident and empowered.

“I think the flattering cut that Carla was so famous for is really important. As well as the sexiness and the agelessness [of her aesthetic],” Ungar says. “A lot of women we connected with felt that this confidence that was definitely part of their emotional attachment to their Carla Zampatti garments; the confidence the garment gave her at the board meeting, the function, the 50th, the occasion she wore the suit to. She always felt amazing in that garment.”

In addition to empowering women through the clothes she made for them, Zampatti led by example, building one of the most successful fashion labels in Australian history and participating in public leadership roles—all the while raising her three children and looking fabulous. “Her success allowed men to realise that a woman who is looking amazing and fashionable is not a woman to be trifled with, it's someone who should be taken very seriously,” Schuman says. For him, that was the impact of Zampatti and her contemporaries, those who founded Chief Executive Women. “They were the first tier of women who broke through the glass ceiling and made it available to everybody.”

In 1981, Zampatti seemed acutely 01 conscious of the path she was forging for generations of women to come. She told the Press Club: “Playing traditional roles of worker, housewife or mother doesn't mean that as a person you must stand still. My child was very important to me, but I did not want to stay home all day looking after him, even if I could afford to. I believed that I should pursue the qualities I had discovered, the things I possessed, so I went into business.”

This advocacy and support for women never stopped. In the weeks before her death, she counselled her friend Christine Holgate, the former chief executive of Australia Post, ahead of the Australia Post senate inquiry. Holgate had been at the centre of a scandal involving then prime minister Scott Morrison, who had publicly admonished her for awarding bonuses to senior executives that were within her discretion to give. Holgate was to present evidence at the inquiry alleging she had been bullied and unlawfully stood down.

Holgate told the ABC in 2022 that Zampatti had strongly urged her to front the inquiry. “She said to me, ‘Darling, what are you going to wear? You have to look fabulous.’ Her point was: Come the day, your clothes are like armour; they give you strength … The last thing you want to be doing is worrying about what you look like,” Holgate said. “And she was absolutely right.” Holgate wore a white Carla 40

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Zampatti blazer, although Zampatti did not live to see it. The day after the hearings, the jacket was on the cover of every newspaper.

Wielding such power and influence is no small thing for an immigrant from Lovero, a province on Italy’s northern border.

When Zampatti arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia aged nine, she didn’t speak any English. Ten years later, she moved to Sydney, determined to pursue her career. It was here she met her first husband who would become her first and only business partner, in 1965. In 1970, they had a child (Schuman), but divorced not long after. She lost her factory but kept the rights to her name. A loan from a family member meant she was able to start the business again. Five years later, she married politician and diplomat John Spender, with whom she would have two more children (fashion designer Bianca Spender and federal politician Allegra Spender).

Her journey from a farm in Italy to the upper echelons of Australian fashion came to represent what was possible when immigrants were able to put their talents to good use and work hard.

“The idea that you can arrive in the country as a nine-year-old nonEnglish speaking girl and reach the heights that she did, accomplishing as much as she did, and be honoured in the way that she was, [made her] a beacon for multicultural Australia,” Schuman says.

In addition to the many boards she served on, Zampatti won the Australian Fashion Laureate in 2008, was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1987 and a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in 2009.

Zampatti believed Australia’s multiculturalism was a thing to be celebrated because of the vibrant communities that migrants created, and also because they were hard workers. “It’s my favourite subject, resilience, because it’s an important quality to find in yourself. It gives you strength, and makes you feel as though nothing can destroy you,” she said to the Sydney Morning Herald in May 2020. “I felt a bit of an outsider, which I have always felt in my life, which is not such a bad thing. Being an outsider makes you try harder.”

This sentiment created a desire within her to encourage and support the dreams of other migrants and led to the business establishing a scholarship in Zampatti’s name through the Australian Multicultural Foundation. In 2022, the $10,000 prize was won by Sofia Abel, a 19-year-old designer from Bolivia who also got the opportunity to spend a week shadowing Ungar at head office.

“It's about celebrating something that’s bigger than Carla Zampatti,” says Schuman, who sits on the award’s judging panel.

“It's celebrating this common value. We're a country that supports young women from non-English speaking backgrounds to overcome extraordinary adversities and set up their own companies. It's amazing.”

Schuman is determined that the business will continue to operate in a way that honours the three pillars to which Zampatti dedicated her life: empowerment of women, support for the arts, and advocating for multiculturalism. He describes a collaboration with artist Lindy Lee as a project that encompasses all three. Lee’s Rain and Fire drawings were photographed and converted into prints which Ungar used to design a range of tops and dresses. The project is dedicated to celebrating women in art and recognising

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01. Karlie Ungar at work in the brand's Sydney studio.

02. Ungar fits a Spring '23 gown on Zampatti's eldest granddaughter Brigid Schuman.

03. Inside the pattern room of the Sydney studio.

04. Inside the pattern room.

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the contribution that women from multicultural backgrounds have made to Australia. The prints were presented in February, at the brand’s first fashion show since Zampatti’s passing. Ungar sent an impressive collection of garments down the runway, with the mark of her predecessor’s clean lines and signature silhouettes proudly visible. The combination of billowy blouses, floor-length coats, biascut silk gowns, and blazers with strong shoulders honoured the late designer’s work.

Although they cannot share details yet, Ungar and Schuman allude to a second artist collaboration and suggest that working this way will be ongoing. “We're hoping and intending to do that every year,” Ungar says. “It’s exploring ways to have the threads of [Carla’s] legacy and love for the arts run through the business.”

The brand’s commitment to advancing arts and culture also extends to five additional awards and funds in Zampatti’s name, including the Australian Fashion Laureate’s Award for Excellence in Leadership, Westpac’s Carla Zampatti Award of Influence, NSW Premier’s Arts and Culture Medal, NSW’s Women’s Venture Capital Fund and Sydney Dance Company’s Commissioning Fund. There is also a runway named after her at Carriageworks in Sydney, while an exhibition dedicated to her life’s work was recently on display at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum for a six-month run.

Zampatti’s love of creativity informed the view she had of fashion and art as elements that can provide a high point in daily life. She described fashion’s “responsibility to take people out of the ordinary [to] give us, if only momentarily, a sense of glamour… to elevate our spirit and transform us into something, which a short time ago, we were not.”

This passion for beauty and the expression of it bled into everything she did. She famously loved yellow and enjoyed driving her yellow Mercedes fast. Her garden was full of palms and magnolias, branches of which ended up in vases around her house.

She was glamorous to the very end, often wearing a blazer with nothing underneath, intimidatingly coiffed with her perfect blonde bob and oversized sunglasses. In an interview with Vogue Australia in 2022, Zampatti’s designer daughter Bianca has described her mother’s loves as the three Fs: food, family and fashion.

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motorcars,” Zampatti said at the Press Club. “Fashion is simply the expression of the need that we have for change [that] lends a little bit of glamour and aura to our lives.”

This sense that fashion is pervasive reinforced her conviction that it was a vocation, and helped her capitalise on it commercially.

She never passed up an opportunity to expand the product offering at Carla Zampatti. “There's not an item that we can ever think of that she didn't do at some stage in her career,” Ungar says. “I always joke, there’s not much you could ask for that we cannot produce at the drop of a hat—any sequin, any headpiece, bra, corset, sequin swimsuit—it's all here.”

In 1985, Zampatti even designed a car. It was a Ford Laser that featured two-tone paint and tan upholstery with a Carla Zampatti signature print running diagonally across it. The print is still used in the business today. Schuman says the car is a great example of how, even though she was an incredible designer, “she was a businesswoman, first and foremost” and “the most extraordinary brand ambassador any company has ever had”.

Zampatti was renowned for connecting creative minds with businesspeople and offering up-and-coming designers advice about how to capitalise financially on their talent. Schuman recalls her chastising a now well-known Australian designer when he was just starting out. “He was making these dresses and she [told him to] stop fussing around, simplify it and make money out of it,” he says. “Giving business advice to the artistic was one of her favourite things, and so was giving creative advice to businesspeople.”

Her business acumen was already well honed in 1981. “The first and foremost ingredient to success in my business is design,” she said at the time. “If you don't get the fashion equation right every time, you will soon find there are few easier ways of losing money than to be stuck with a collection the public doesn't want to buy.”

Even then, her commitment to local manufacturing—which has been on the decline in Australian fashion for decades—was strong. She dismissed suggestions from the Press Club audience that she go offshore to bring down the cost of her garments and explained how she would have to produce a lot more clothes to meet the minimum orders required, which would change the way her designs were perceived. “Mine are specially designed garments; I don't compromise,” she said.

There is no doubt that Zampatti's multifaceted legacy across multiculturalism and the arts will live on in her children, grandchildren and the company that bears her name. But her story is primarily about a woman who believed in herself and the women around her, who made clothes that emboldened them to dream, and who, over the course of her life, did everything she could to help those dreams come true.

This legacy feels safe in Schuman and Ungar’s hands. Their commitment to honouring the life and work of Carla Zampatti is evident in the depth of their thinking and the broad strokes they are employing to encompass it.

“I am lucky that she was so complex and such an octopus,” Ungar says. “We’ve got this insane body of creative work to explore.

But we've also got women's culture today evolving at such a rapid rate, and she was such a champion of that. If you bring the two things together, there's no end of input and inspiration. I think it's so important, because for Carla Zampatti, creativity doesn't stop with the garments and the product, it’s really in everything.”

As a business, Carla Zampatti remains committed to Australian manufacturing. Schuman says that aside from the silk, leather and denim pieces, everything is still made locally. “It definitely gives us an advantage,” he says. "It allows us to be much closer to the market, [which] reduces our lead times. This prevents over-ordering and having to dispose of what doesn’t sell. “Mum was very frugal and really loathed waste. So, it was a model that really suited her, [because it means] you can manufacture for the demand at the time, in the colour or size that the market wants. She was very shrewd in that way.”

This determination to remain close to the market made her eternally inquisitive about women and what they wanted, and exceedingly good at predicting their needs. Her garments have been worn across generations of Australian women, from politicians to popstars.

“We're not always what people see us to be,” Zampatti said more than four decades ago. “It's the fashion designer's task to cater for both the real person and our dream of what we would like to be and achieve a harmonious blend between myth and reality.”

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01. S/S 2015 at the Sydney Opera House. Image courtesy of the Carla Zampatti archives 02. Carla Zampatti leather accessories.

03. Custom runway shoe samples for the February 2023 show.

04. Spring ‘23 collection samples.

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Word of glow – By Genevieve Phelan

The science of good skin, and how Richard Parker's Melbourne-based global skincare brand, Rationale, is helping people get it.

01. Inside Rationale's airy and luminous headquarters.

02. The Renewal product range is based on 30 years of research into human skin health.

03. Founder Richard Parker.

Images supplied by Rationale

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There aren’t many people who can adhere to a 3am wakeup routine and maintain an unequivocally radiant visage. An exception to that norm is cosmetic chemist Richard Parker, founder and research director of Melbourne-based luxury skincare brand Rationale, whose face glows through my computer screen when we speak. Parker claims his early rises are essential for cultivating the self-described “quiet time” necessary to indulge the creative thinking that drives Rationale. “I think Rationale is unusual in that we kind of stand alone, to my knowledge, in the way we approach human skin,” Parker says. “I always say human skin is my research library, and my guiding light— it's where I start with everything.”

Now representing a global standard for research-based skincare, Rationale emerged from somewhat accidental beginnings, led by Parker’s own skin concerns. “I wasn't born with good skin genes,” he says. “I had my mother's tendency for sun damage, and my father's tendency for acne. So by the age of 25, I had sun damage and acne and I thought ‘there’s got to be something I can do about that’”.

In 1990, Parker decided to channel his keen interest and self-led research in skin into a small consultancy, which he opened in South Yarra with his now-husband Greg. Here, clients sought out what Parker calls his natural “skintuition”. He would review their existing skincare routines and craft new customised rituals,

guiding clients towards suitable pharmaceutical products—available at the chemist—to combat specific skin concerns or deficiencies.

It didn’t take long for the consultancy to make waves through Melbourne. In 1992, The Age published a full-page story about Parker’s work, which completely altered the course of his life. “You can imagine, you can't pay for publicity like that,” he says.

“So it just took off. We were inundated with calls, and there were a lot of dermatologists who read that article and liked what I was doing.”

The consultancy ran for several years before Parker started inventing his own products. In 1995, he and Greg launched Skintech Co2, a cosmetics company specialising KAY & BURTON

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in products for patients recovering from laser surgery.

They started with four products: a gentle cleansing lotion, a moisturising gel, a skin refining AHA gel and an SPF15+ tinted sunscreen base. Laser surgery was a very new technology in Australia at that time and was blowing up internationally. The products were only made available to doctors and dermatologists.

It was during this time that Parker clearly saw the manifestations of sun damage, which is responsible, he says, for 80 per cent of facial aging. Lines, wrinkles, pigmentation, sagging skin, sensitivity: “All of those things are caused by the sun,” he says. “It occurred to me that anything we did to restore skin health or prevent further aging had to address the sun; it was right there in that early research.”

They soon expanded the brand into the US, and over the next 30 years, Parker and his growing team of scientists developed a portfolio of products. In 2005, Parker became a qualified cosmetic chemist, and the business was officially rebranded Rationale in 2008. “Now, our focus goes deeper and deeper into addressing sun damage,” Parker says. “We deal with [both] prevention of sun damage and reversal of sun damage—that’s our foundation. When you heal someone’s skin health, they look great. They're happier, too. And there's a biological reason for that. When your skin is healthy, you make happy hormones, you feel better, you look better; it's this positive upward cycle.”

Rationale’s first Australian flagship store opened in 2010 in Toorak. That year, the rapidly growing brand unveiled its skincare paradigm, dubbed 'skin identical' technology. This translates to considering human skin in a state of optimal health and beauty, culminating in the Essential Six product range for which Rationale is now broadly recognised. The range is built upon Parker’s six pillars of skin health: resilience, vitality, brilliance, integrity, 46

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01. Sleek packaging and dermatologist endorsement set Rationale's tinted sunscreen apart.

02. Architect Robin Williams designed the brand's monumental head office.

03. A Rationale research lab.

04. Australian Ballet dancer and Rationale ambassador Ako Kondo.

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clarity, and renewal. When these qualities diminish, Rationale’s theory is to reengineer them.

“All the answers are right there in the skin,” Parker says. “We look at vitamins, minerals, proteins, lipids, and enzymes that are found naturally in human skin. We find out what happens to them when things go wrong, and then we strive to put them back into equilibrium. It’s amazing how successful that formula has been.”

Now with 13 Australian stores and a broadening international footprint thanks to a significant investment from South Korean beauty juggernaut Amorepacific, Rationale has built a reputation that sits somewhere between wellness and medicine. In an industry that is so heavily saturated, rife with buzzwords and vulnerable to the pitfalls of influencer marketing, Rationale’s preeminence as a genuinely science-driven solution for healthy skin seems to endure. Parker says Rationale customers recognise it as a “research company that makes skincare”, rather than a “skincare company that does research”. New clients can opt for an in-store consultation to ascertain their skincare needs, in which a UV light diagnostic tool is used to identify a myriad of skin concerns. DNA testing is also offered, which gives the brand insight into the epigenetic makeup of a customer’s skin and allows Rationale’s team to further tailor care regimes.

“We straddle two worlds; we're a bit of a conduit between medicine and luxury beauty,” he says. And while doctors might love the brand because of its scientific approach, consumers love the products because of the results. “I can be at a dinner party with 20 people and identify, with 100 per cent accuracy, the six women who are using Rationale. It's not so much word of mouth as it is ‘word of glow’.”

Last year, Rationale’s Melbourne team relocated from its city dwellings to a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art facility in Kyneton, central Victoria. The new headquarters are strategically positioned in the Macedon Ranges where the team is working on a project to use mineral water from a local spring in Rationale products. The water has a high calcium concentration and contains a bounty of other minerals.

The ultra-modern facility is the built manifestation of the brand’s research-based philosophy. Labs are positioned right in the middle of the building, housing a team of research scientists that work alongside Parker to implement all formulation, prototyping work and clinical research projects. Everything originates from this regional cornucopia.

In fact, when a formula sheet goes into production, it’s all completed right there on-site. About 40 per cent of Rationale’s employees are local to the office area, while the remaining team members commute from Melbourne.

“It’s so beautiful,” Parker beams when describing the 14,000sqm building. “It's very inspiring and uplifting, with plentiful glasswork giving way to nature, trees and fresh air. The space is so conducive to doing your best work and paving the future of beauty.” rationale.com

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When roots run deep Photography SIMON GRIFFITHS

Preeminent landscape designer Paul Bangay OAM reflects on evolving attitudes to outdoor living and the momentous decision to leave Stonefields, his treasured home and two-decade project widely regarded as one of the world’s finest private gardens.

When word spread late last year of the sale of Stonefields, the 20-hectare estate near Daylesford synonymous with one of Australia’s most sought-after landscape designers, the public reaction fell somewhere between astonishment and anguish. The notion that Paul Bangay could move on from the infinitely photographable property he transformed from bare paddocks in 2004 to the nation’s most famous formal garden, which he himself dubbed his magnum opus, seemed unfathomable. But fresh from finishing his tenth book—a break from his trusted gardening handbook style in favour of more personal recollections—Bangay seems wholly at ease with stepping into a new chapter. “There are not many domestic gardens in Australia that are open to the public and people have kind of lived through the creation of Stonefields via my books and Instagram, seeing how it changed on a weekly basis, so I suppose the thought of the garden being separated from me is a big deal,” he says. “But it’s at the point where I can't tinker around without demolishing areas and starting again, so there’s a little bit of frustration involved for me there, and the main reason for selling is so that I can slow down a bit.”

Due to turn 60 later this year, he reasons that time is ticking on his chance to create something new and a home that does not call for two full-time gardeners is the logical move. “A garden like this takes 10 years to build, so my next will be the one we enjoy for the rest of our lives, and it's got to be more manageable,” he adds.

In the process of writing A Life in Garden Design about 40 years of professional and personal endeavour, Bangay says: “This one was more stressful than my other books because you worry about how people are going to feel being mentioned, or not mentioned at all, but it has also naturally ended up being a history of landscape design in Australia.

When I started out, a lot of people would build a house and then put the garden in afterwards themselves, whereas now the garden is an integral part of the home design process.” He adds that the lockdown era pushed backyard aesthetics and the therapeutic merits of gardening right up the agenda; “Being stuck in the house for a long time made everyone realise just how vital a garden is to life, which is what led to plant shortages as well as material and labour shortages.”

And while he is thrilled to hear from amateur gardeners who have replicated designs from his books (he believes there is “no such thing as copying in this industry” and considers providing

inspiration a key part of his job), he is wary of instant gratification culture infiltrating people’s attitudes to landscape. “The trend towards impatience seems to be getting worse, people want big established trees but don’t want to wait for them to grow for example, all because they saw some picture on social media,” he laments.

Among the things he will miss most about Stonefields is walking among the slow-growing oaks and sugar maples he installed as saplings. “I take great delight in being able to walk and sit under a tree that I planted as a baby tree 20 years ago, which my husband and I often do when we walk our cocker spaniel… I probably won’t see trees [of mine] that big again,” he says.

One of the unique aspects of a design discipline that relies on living things is the product never being in stasis. “I’m still returning to gardens we did 30 years ago because there's a relationship there that goes on forever,” he points out. Lauded for his expansive and timeless gardens, Bangay hopes to focus on fewer and larger countryside projects in the coming years and to follow the example of professional heroes such as Russell Page, who worked well into his dotage.

As for Stonefields, he could not be happier to see the estate going to fellow high-profile gardener Jamie Durie via his Opulus Hotels consortium, with the reported $11m sale due to settle in November. The group has already announced plans to invest $70m in developing 50 luxurious eco-friendly villas and a destination restaurant on the site, which is just over an hour’s drive from Melbourne, within the next two years. The fact Durie pursued horticulture as a career on the advice of Bangay a quarter-century ago makes the passing of the baton seem like a poignant inevitability.

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01. A rill cascades to the entrance of the Tuscan-style villa at Stonefields.

02. Harold the peacock patrols the grounds.

03. Paul Bangay amid the climbing plants used to soften the formal aspects of Stonefields’ design.

04. The swimming pool lawn leads down to mass plantings of herbaceous perennials.

05. Symmetrical cube-shaped hedges contrast with the wild woodland beyond the property line.

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Paul Bangay: A Life in Garden Design is published by Thames & Hudson Australia (September 2023).

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Bangay says: “We couldn't have asked for a better solution. As my friend Annie Smithers [highlighted] to me early on, the only way someone's going to preserve this garden is through a commercial venture; it has been my life and calling card, if you will, but it is a significant investment.” He adds: “Knowing the public will still be able to access it has helped me with the decision to relinquish my custodianship, and when Jamie asked if I would be happy to help if there are design decisions to be made, I said ‘of course, definitely’.” The commitment of the new owners to environmentally sensitive development is another bonus for Bangay, who is increasingly adapting his design vision to account for harsher and drier conditions, including rethinking the lush green lawns of his formal, axis-based signature gardens.

Having made his name with clean architectural lines and precision-cut topiary, Bangay says his outlook is softening with time. “The world has moved on from formality, I can't do any more boxwood balls,” he jokes. “I'm kind of excited for the next garden to explore a softer, more casual, slightly wilder style,” he says, “but still with a little bit of classicism in there.” Until the next grand project reveals itself, the lifelong anglophile has a quarter-acre to tend at his 450-year-old cottage in the Cotswolds. Since acquiring

the pretty-as-a-postcard property in 2019, Bangay has been excitedly decamping there with his British-born husband for two to three months of the year to craft a romantic pocket of flowers and ferns like those pictured in the English gardening tomes he devoured as a youngster. He fondly recalls trips to the local library with his greenthumbed mother to find books by poet and gardener Vita Sackville-West and credits his parents for his innate appreciation of plants.

When he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in 2018, Bangay was gratified for the role of landscape designers to be elevated closer to that of his architect collaborators. Indeed, designing for scale, balance, texture and colour using materials that grow and change requires a particular brand of farsightedness.

Aside from aesthetic enjoyment, he envisions his next home garden as an edible one; “It must be a size we can easily look after and a lot more productive—when I dream of old age it is looking after a great veggie garden.” Wherever that may be, he says sharing it with those who have loved attending his tours of Stonefields or eagerly await his social media updates will continue to motivate him. “We really do love sharing the garden and though I don’t yet know how public the next one will be, we will share the journey for sure,” he adds.

Kay & Burton is a proud partner of NGVWA Garden Day on 26 October. This year’s event will see some of the finest private gardens in Caulfield and surrounds opened to visitors, with ticket proceeds going towards art acquisitions by the state gallery. ngv.vic.gov.au/support-us/ngvwa

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DESIGN IN DIALOGUE: OLIVE GILL-HILLE

Olive Gill-Hille photographed

by Nick FitzPatrick, courtesy of Dilettante

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Perth-based multidisciplinary artist and designer Olive Gill-Hille shares the ethos behind her sculptures in wood. – Interview by Steve Dow

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01. Form (2022). Image: Olive Gill-Hille and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert

STEVE DOW: Your work transfigures wood into these sensual, supple-looking works of art, often referencing human forms. When did you fall in love with working with wood?

OLIVE GILL-HILLE: It was during my second go at study, which was an associate degree of furniture design at RMIT [after a Bachelor of Fine Art specialising in sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts]. I started working with wood five years ago.

There’s something so warm about wood; it feels really connected to humans. It’s a very familiar material, something we all have memories of touching. I also love the transformative qualities of wood, especially the timbers that I use, which are gnarly and rugged.

It’s pretty amazing that it can go from something from the earth and become such a refined and polished art object or design object in our homes.

SD: There are no sharp edges visible in your work. How many hours of carving and sanding are required to achieve that result?

OG-H: It’s a lot of hours. Sanding is the biggest part of the process; it takes a lot of sanding to get it to the finish that I want.

There’s that ‘10,000 hours’ thing [the notion that ‘mastery’ can be achieved through 10,000 hours of practice]. I’m not there yet, but it’s probably not far off with the sanding and carving.

It’s long days, and very physical work.

SD: In the process of creating these often-feminine forms through your work, are you consciously embodying your own physicality and emotions?

OG-H: Definitely. I love the work of artists such as Henry Moore and Hans Arp; these incredible sculptors whose work has been around for years but often possess this almost voyeuristic quality. Mine are [a form of] self-portraiture; they’re referencing my own body. I’m trying to replicate curves or forms I’m very familiar with because they’re my forms.

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SD: So your work is in dialogue with the modernist sculptures and responding to the male gaze of the likes of Moore and Arp, as well as Constantin Brâncuși and Isamu Noguchi?

OG-H: For sure, I’m responding to the male gaze.

It’s almost a taking back of those shapes. The work I do is so physical that it has often been a maledominated industry, so it is interesting for me to go into that realm, not just working in these sorts of shapes but also in these sorts of materials and trying to break that open; to feminise a maledominated industry.

SD: You were born and raised in Perth before temporarily relocating to Melbourne to study. What childhood influences led you to become the artist and designer you are today?

OG-H: I’ve always been around art and sculpture; it’s a big part of my family, but more painting. I still do paintings, watercolours and things, but I’m always thinking in a three-dimensional space. Even though I love painting, it just wasn’t my form.

My dad was a painter, which is why I was always around art, and I was always encouraged to create every day.

SD: Your sculptural process begins with you sketching and painting in watercolours to work things out. Take us through this process.

OG-H: There are two different starting points for me.

Sometimes, it starts with an idea; I’m responding to a theme or something that is topical in my life, whether that’s life or death or relationships. Sometimes I begin the process with sketches, planning and creating laminated works, which is more traditional woodworking. Other times, I find a particular piece of timber that really speaks to me, and work with that to create an art object.

SD: Tell us about the timbers you work with.

OG-H: At the moment, I’m working with Western Australian timbers because it really is about responding to landscape, responding to my site here [near Fremantle].

Sourcing the material is a big part of my practice and the narrative that goes along with personally sourcing the material from fallen trees, or ethically sourced timbers. Sometimes it’s a matter of going to farms, to properties where trees have been felled because of powerlines or because of safety concerns, and using that timber to make the work. Sometimes, I will work with imported timbers; it really depends on what I feel the work is about.

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SD: I imagine some strength is required to wrangle the wood—you must be quite physically strong?

OG-H: I wish I could say yes [laughs]. I can endure a lot; it’s an endurance exercise. I have a block and chain that I use to lift things. I’ve also got very helpful friends who are probably getting a bit tired of being called up and asked to help move things.

It’s a very physically demanding job but so much of me goes into each piece. I never outsource the work; I make most of it entirely from start to finish—that’s what makes the value. The hand of the artist is really critical to me, especially because I’m thinking about how personal [the works] are, and how responsive to my own experiences they are.

SD: Your latest exhibition with Gallery Sally DanCuthbert is titled Asymptote, a geometric term denoting a line that a curve approaches as it moves toward infinity but never meets. Can you tell us more about this theme?

OG-H: For this show, I was thinking a lot about the moment before touch for two people who have had a courtship but haven’t actually touched yet; this idea of a precipice. On a larger scale, it’s about this moment before impact, when you never really know that you’re going to touch or if the impact is going to happen […it’s about that sense of] tension and anticipation.

I was talking to friends and the word ‘asymptote’ came up. I’m not the most mathematically minded person, but just hearing what that meant, I realised that was what I was aiming for.

01. The artist sanding a work for her previous exhibition, Trunk. Image: Emma Pegrum 02. Jarrah wall reliefs Interface 1 and Interface 2 (2023). Image © Olive Gill-Hille 03. The works in the Asymptote exhibition are made from jarrah, sheoak and eucalyptus wood with a black ebonised finish. The artist is photographed here by Olivia Senior ebonising such a piece in her studio.

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SD: Your 2022 piece Nocturne, made of American black walnut, was a finalist in the Ramsay Prize and is on display at the Art Gallery of South Australia. You have said that the work emerged from a period of sleepless nights, during which your mind was racing and pulling in different directions. Is feeling stress conducive to making art?

OG-H: I need to get work done in the next two weeks for my next show, and [the feeling of stress] doesn’t feel conducive right now! Nocturne was made during Covid, where there was a lot of uncertainty for everyone. As an artist you want to create works that resonate with people.

SD: The title Nocturne also evokes Chopin. Do you play music while you work?

OG-H: I do play music. I can actually listen to the same song 15 times when I’m angle grinding [laughs]. I’m embarrassed to say, but ‘Believe’ by Cher comes on a bit. I do listen to classical music, that’s something I inherited from my dad. When I conceived of Nocturne, Dad had just passed away, so the piece references his love of music too.

Asymptote by Olive Gill-Hille is showing until November 5 at Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert in Rushcutters Bay. olivegillhille.com

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As buyers seek out more flexible housing options, boutique apartment developments are diversifying the prestige residential market. Two new ultra-luxury Melbourne-developments from Neometro and Orchard Piper provide perfect examples, both achieving bespoke quality and enviable convenience.

Just last year, as expatriates flocked home post-pandemic, property analysts predicted a surge in demand for luxury apartments in Australia. And with the number of ultra-high net worth individuals projected to increase by 40.9% over the next five years, coupled with a belief that Australia is the best place to shelter from any new global health or economic storm, the prediction is taking off.

Apartment lifestyle suits a growing desire for easier living, with fewer domestic demands such as gardening and maintenance. And with developers and architects responding with bigger and better designs, it’s coming without compromise on quality and spaciousness.

But while Sydney and the Gold Coast sparkle with their luxurious

high-rise options, citing mostly developments with 100 apartments or more, Melbourne remains true to form with its understated, quiet luxury alternatives. This is epitomised in two new offerings in the city’s south-east: Orchard Piper’s Toorak Village and Neometro’s 49 Walsh Street.

Toorak Village is closest to completion—construction started in August and is expected to be ready in mid-2025. At 49 Walsh Street, construction is expected to begin in 2024, for completion in early 2026.

Neometro director James Tutton says the company’s Walsh Street property is an unprecedented offering in the Melbourne market. Located in the leafy interior of South Yarra's historic Domain Precinct, the building comprises 10 apartments over four levels, including a top-floor penthouse that looks out over the neighbourhood’s flourishing tree canopy.

“The building is both a design high-point and unprecedented, for Neometro as a firm but also for Melbourne,” he says. The company worked with Morq, a small-scale Italian-Australian architecture studio with outposts in both Rome and Perth. Tutton says they wanted Morq

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to “cast a fresh set of eyes on our local landscape”, and the result is a timeless architectural offering centred on the relationship between natural light, geometry and materiality. “[Walsh Street is] what we would call ‘quiet luxury’,” Tutton says.

“It’s not the gold-tap variant of luxury, it’s far more refined.”

The building itself is set to be of modern, concrete form, reminiscent of Morq’s celebrated Mediterranean villas in its earthy tones and textured finish but firmly embedded in its own leafy streetscape. Wide, geometric terraces wrap around the exterior, ensuring privacy between floors, extending living space, and creating a distinctive look and feel that prioritises light and connection to the area’s urban ecology.

On the ground floor, which is slightly sunken into the landscape, two-bedroom apartments starting at 176sqm are accessed through private entrances. The bedrooms are minimal, restful spaces, with reading nooks built into floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look out into cosy private courtyards. Here, lush greenery plantings create a sense of harmony between outside and in. The apartments also offer open living areas and kitchens as well as outdoor cooking and dining areas.

Enveloped by trees and bathed in dappled light, the first- and second-floor apartments are designed to “elevate living” and provide comfort and enjoyment throughout different phases of life. The emphasis is on bringing natural light right through the home, while open, geometric rooms with tall ceilings offer flexibility in terms of use and configuration.

While each floor has its own allure, it’s the ~490sqm penthouse that is the centrepiece of 49 Walsh Street. It is demarcated by three generous zones: a private suite with main bedroom, secluded guest rooms and flexible spaces, and grand living and dining areas. The entire apartment is bordered by a large, private terrace, and the entrance is distinguished by a private lobby, lift and gallery space.

“The interplay of the external landscape, the interplay of light and texture, and the role of both light and darkness culminate to create a sense of calm for the people in these buildings,” Tutton says.

This is enhanced by features such as soundproofing to block external noise, the well-situated green plantings, and the inclusion of understated, quality finishes and fixtures including industry-leading appliances, refined tapware, internal robes, and high-performance windows and frames. It’s a light, but hugely evocative touch. “It’s a bit like an orchestra, all of these things come together in this beautiful harmony: the finish, the texture and how that reflects light within the building.”

He believes the building’s quiet ambience is something that busy, high-performing individuals place considerable value on. And from both a scale and privacy perspective, people who want to live in an upscale development will inherently prefer the privacy of living alongside only nine other apartments as opposed to something with anything from 30 apartments or more, he says.

Tutton is seeing a range of buyers coming in, from empty-nesters who have sold their family homes and want something less demanding, to younger buyers coming in for the big and elegant living spaces.

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01. Artist's impression of an earth-toned lounge room at 49 Walsh Street.

02. Wraparound terraces distinguish Morq's design (artist's impression).

03. The development is a stone's throw from the Royal Botanic Gardens.

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“To get the outcome we want, everything just has to be the best of the best. The 10 individuals or families or couples who buy into the 49 Walsh Street project are going to be living in probably the most beautiful apartments in Melbourne.”

The price of the apartments range from $3.9m (ground floor) to just over $20m. Likening the property to London’s Belgravia for its proximity to the Royal Botanic Gardens, the Tan, the Yarra River and the CBD, Tutton says the price is a compelling offer—especially considering Domain Precinct has some of Victoria’s highest land values per square metre.

Orchard Piper’s new Toorak Village, meanwhile, takes up another landmark address at the corner of Toorak and Mathoura roads—right in the heart of the neighbourhood’s resurgent village centre.

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and an interior that offers both respite and connection. Overall, the building makes a contemporary statement, fronting Toorak Road with a defined premium retail colonnade and, above, a façade of glass, concrete, breezeblock and terraced greenery.

It's one of Orchard Piper’s most exclusive addresses to date, with just nine boutique three- and four-bedroom apartments of between 312sqm and 617sqm—each with its own private lobby. Apartment interiors evoke the soothing ambience of a world-class retreat, with solid oak cabinetry, full-length windows, jade-coloured marble accents, minimalist leather-wrapped furnishings and refined marblelined bathrooms with dual vanity. Texture is added through bronze anodised aluminium shelving, French wash wall paint, and sheer curtains that filter the outside in.

Even the more practical design requirements balance the desire for both privacy and connectivity. For example, each of the building’s central lifts is shared by only two apartments.

KHA director Patrick Kosky says the firm was excited to have its

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first Victorian project. When the team accepted the brief, they knew working in Melbourne would mean becoming part of its rich design culture, he says. They also saw a clear alignment with Orchard Piper’s own design and quality ethos. “[Orchard Piper] approached the design process in a really sophisticated way,” Kosky says. “[The firm] encouraged creative approaches to design challenges, allowing us to formulate solutions that retained an integrity in the design.”

Orchard Piper director Luke McKie says the property has attracted customers who know a rare opportunity when they see it.

“Many of the buyers already live just a couple of streets away, and know that a project on the doorstep of Toorak happens only once every 20—30 years at these levels,” he adds. The uniqueness of the opportunity shows: more than half of the property’s nine apartments are already sold off the plan.

While the main demographic attracted to the development is the 65-and-over market, enquiries so far have been broad. “We’ve had enquiries from successful young and middle-aged corporates,

01. Orchard Piper's bold new development evolves the architectural language of Toorak Road (artist's impression).

02. Locally sourced design facets tie Toorak Village residences to the neighbourhood (artist's impression).

03. The design of Kerry Hill Architects targets a sense of luxury unrivalled in Australia (artist's impression).

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such as bankers and lawyers in their 40s and 50s—people who are used to a more transient life,” McKie says. Prospective buyers are looking for convenience and ease of location, with no compromise on spaciousness or quality of life at home.

“A lot of our clients still want to host dinners, they still have friends stay from overseas, they still have kids and grandkids come to stay with them. They’re having a second lounge, a kitchen with a scullery, and three car parks all side by side,” he says. “There are not many compromises here other than the backyard.”

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Food & Drink

Food & Drink

Food & Drink

REINE AND LA RUE

MFWF REGIONAL EDITION 2023

POETICA BAR & GRILL

An ambitious French restaurant and bar by Sydney’s Nomad Group has brought life to the historic former Melbourne Stock Exchange— and given the city its most opulent new dining room. In the kitchen, head chef Brendan Katich (Nomad Melbourne) and group executive chef Jacqui Challinor are serving up French classics such as wood-fired grilled steaks, fruit de mer platters, and duck neck sausage cassoulet. The impressive international wine list runs 700 bins deep, with over 40 available by the glass. 380 Collins Street, Melbourne. reineandlarue.melbourne

November will see Gippsland, Ballarat and the Yarra Valley welcome events for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival’s second annual regional edition. Designed to showcase the regions’ best produce and culinary talent, the 10-day program features not one but two World’s Longest Lunch events (Ballarat and Coldstream); a two-day celebration of Gippsland’s best at The Village Feast; wine parties, cheese tastings, cherry-picking, art shows and more in the Yarra Valley; plus, local gin and brews, Indigenous flavours and ‘mine dining’ in historic Ballarat.

18—27 November, various locations. melbournefoodandwine.com.au

The North Sydney restaurant scene is heating up, with the recent addition of Poetica Bar and Grill bringing fire to table. Led by Michelin-trained head chef Connor Hartley-Simpson (ex-The Ledbury, London; Gastrologik, Stockholm; Quince, San Francisco), the kitchen brings a mod-Euro accent to seafood and grilled proteins, using fire, wood, and charcoal to amp up flavours in meticulously sourced produce. The 700-bottle wine wall will delight oenophiles, while the four outdoor dining terraces and adjoining 40-seater bar invite casual visits. Mezzanine level, 1 Denison Street, North Sydney. poetica.sydney

Food & Drink

Food & Drink

Food & Drink

VUE DE MONDE

FUNDA

BANSHO

After closing for a months-long, multimillion-dollar refurb that promises to transform the acclaimed fine diner into ‘a completely new venue’, Vue de Monde will finally reopen in late October. Architecture firm Elenberg Fraser has overseen the project, which encompasses Lui Bar and the restaurant’s events space. Meanwhile, The Vue Group has secured a 15-year lease on the longdormant Fitzroy Gardens pavilion in East Melbourne, which it intends to revive as a possible ‘Vue De Monde in The Park’ after a $4m renovation. 525 Collins Street, Melbourne. vuedemonde.com.au

Chef Jung-su Chang of South Korea’s twoMichelin-star restaurant Jungsik Seoul is behind a new modern Korean venue in the emerging Asian restaurant precinct of Sydney’s Bridge Street. Chang, who has worked for French chef Pierre Gagnaire, flexes his European chops on the menu, which sees head chef Chris Kim (ex-Sepia, Tetsuya’s) combine Asian and Australian ingredients with Korean tradition to result in a true culinary adventure. Keep an eye out for the more formal 12-seat omakase, Allta, which is set to open next door in October. 50 Pitt Street, Sydney. fundasydney.com.au

Melding the distinct yet harmonious influences of French and Japanese cuisines, this stylish, low-lit Armadale bistro is a worthy addition to the flourishing High Street restaurant precinct. The menu, by chefs Tomotaka Ishizuka (ex-Ishizuka, Kisume) and Yoonho Chang (ExLume and Geranium, Copenhagen), showcases seasonal seafood and premium beef cuts, with dedicated sushi and vegan menus also available. Desserts and sides run more Francophile in approach, and the drinks list incorporates Japanese-inspired cocktails and well-priced wines from around the globe. 960 High St, Armadale. banshodining.com

OUT AND ABOUT 60

THE LUXURY REPORT

ISSUE 7

Food & Drink

Performing Arts

Visual Art

JACKSONS ON GEORGE

JUAN DIEGO FLÓREZ IN RECITAL

PRIMAVERA 2023

Encompassing a ground-floor pub, first-floor restaurant and wine bar (Bistro George), and a rooftop terrace and bar with killer views of the city skyline, this striking boat-shaped reincarnation of a once-grungy Sydney boozer at the new Sydney Place precinct in Circular Quay oozes Sydney swagger and good looks.

Hospitality visionary Maurice Terzini (Icebergs, CicciaBella) is behind the dining experience, enlisting enlisting Steven Sinclair (ex-Icebergs) as executive chef to steer a "simple, elegant” European/Australian approach to the sophisticated modern pub fare. 176 George Street, Sydney. jacksonsongeorge.com.au

Direct from Lima, Peru, acclaimed operatic tenor Juan Diego Flórez will make his Australian debut at Hamer Hall this November, delivering the same enigmatic on-stage charm and rapture-inspiring virtuosic performance style that has demanded encores and standing ovations the world over. The recipient of a string of accolades, with none other than Luciano Pavarotti describing him as “charming, talented, with a beautiful voice”, Flórez is considered the greatest bel canto tenor of his generation. Hamer Hall, 2 November. artscentremelbourne.com

MCA’s Primavera returns for its 32nd year to spotlight the work of Australia’s next generation of formidable creatives. Having catalysed the careers of over 250 emerging talents—including Shaun Gladwell, Abdul Abdullah and 2022 Archibald prize winner Julia Gutman—the exhibition will this year showcase never-before-shown works that focus on the theme of the collective body.

Taking in a broad spectrum of mediums and conceptual expression, the 2023 exhibition is curated by Sydney-based New Zealand artist Talia Smith. Image: Personal computer: ramin ntaangan (detail) by Tiyan Baker.

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney. Until 4 February. mca.com.au

Visual Art

Visual Art

MICHELLE USSHER: THINGS FALL APART

PAUL BOSTON: STONE CLOUDS

Presented by Melbourne’s Station Gallery, Things Fall Apart by London-based Australian artist Michelle Ussher explores the fertile space between the figurative and the abstract. Oscillating between the realms of imagination and the unconscious, Ussher scrutinises and reinterprets the cliches of Western representations of female identity and sexuality. In this captivating collection of paintings and ceramics, she explores a vivid interplay of colour and the mesmerising allure of half-materialised forms to arresting effect. Image: Monster Moan (detail).

Station Gallery, South Yarra. Until 4 November. stationgallery.com

Showcasing the artist's quiet, thoughtful approach to space, light and materiality, this retrospective charts the creative evolution and enduring propositions of abstract artist Paul Boston. Boston’s four-decade career journey—which has seen his work acquired by the likes of the NGV, NGA and AGNSW, and saw him spend time working as a gardener at Heide in his youth—now culminates in his return to the museum, symbolising a renewed artistic identity and the cyclical nature of existence. Heide Museum. Until 10 February. heide.com.au

KAY & BURTON

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Melbourne 80 Collins Street Shop 2 Armadale 975 High Street senerbesim.com

nabprivate.com.au