Designers at Home | Gillian Khaw
Gillian Khaw, co-founder of interior design studio Handelsmann + Khaw, has cultivated a sophisticated, heritage-laden, feminine-led aesthetic in her work, but her Sydney home demanded a more rigorous, minimalist approach to suit her family’s lifestyle.
The 1980s were a defining time for interior design and architecture. Names like Richard Meier, Andrée Putman, Michael Graves and Anouska Hempel were making indelible aesthetic moves with everything from modest purity to radical postmodernism and radical simplicity to luxury opulence. This era was ripe for the picking when interior designer Gillian Khaw crafted her Sydney apartment in a building that was established in 1989. But with such a variety of cultural influences, as well as the request from her husband for pure minimalism, the balance and harmony of these inspirations required a steady, confident hand.
“It’s funny because while the brief was from me to myself, I did have to consider my husband’s taste,” says Khaw. “I’m very conscious that he’s actually a super-minimal person. He would live in the plainest John Pawson house if he could, whereas stylistically, I’d have a lot more charm, warmth and layers.”
As she and her work partner Tania Handelsmann do with clients of Handelsmann + Khaw – looking perhaps for the Sydney firm’s distinctive elegance that blends heritage, feminine style and statement details – Khaw gave a presentation of her plans to her husband. “On one hand, you’re worried that they’re not going to accept it, but on the other hand, in this instance I live here too, so that was my trump card,” she says. “I did say at the end of the day, if he didn’t like the scheme, I wouldn’t do it … but thankfully he liked it, and I showed him all the materials and the super-minimal palette.”
With its enviable views of Sydney Harbour, the Elizabeth Bay apartment was an unexpected find when Khaw and her husband, exhausted from constantly missing out on what they were after in the suburbs, stumbled upon the listing. The owner had purchased the apartment as a once-a year home away from home. “It was like a museum,” recalls Khaw of the time capsule, complete with a black-lacquered dining suite at the first inspection. “The view is what got me, and it’s almost like when I looked at the apartment, I turned my back to that view because I thought, ‘I don’t want to be autopilot and thinking a little bit more deeply about it.’ It was more, ‘What can I subtract to make this feel good?’”
The “bizarre, height-of-the-’80s” floor plan was the first element that required Khaw’s deeper thinking. Built around two octagons, the split-level apartment featured rooms that come off and feed into foyers. “The hardest thing was working around risers. We have cement slabs, and we can’t move wet areas around, so it was making sense of them, making them not all octagonal or rhomboid shapes but proper squares, and then fitting it into this Tetris of a floor plan to make it flow a bit better.”
The entry experience of being delivered into the private threshold was another element that drew Khaw to the apartment. “You get out of the lift, and it’s just us in every space,” she says. “Maybe this was fed from watching movies when I was young, but I love those New York apartments where you come out of your lift into your apartment, and curating that first moment when you come out is quite important. It was about centring a circular foyer around that lift, then having a central spine that runs through the apartment so that you can see the full width of it, from the far east to the far west, and that gives you a long corridor and a sightline.”
The desired minimalist, almost monastic aesthetic is seen in the crisp white walls, absence of cornices, limestone floors and Vitrocsa frameless glass windows. Yet in signature Khaw fashion, punctuated moments of form can be found – for instance, the striking dining area with Standard chairs by Jean Prouvé, a Hill House chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Alias Seconda chair by Mario Botta, beneath a pendant light by Anna Charlesworth. The zone could even be read as a contemporary reimagining of that black-lacquered set that took up original residence. “Impracticality is a bad word,” she reflects, “but I always have it in the back of my mind that, in some way, the bit of wrong in a room is what makes it special.”
Arguably the boldest space is the stainless-steel-adorned kitchen, born from negating a structural column and dressing up something ugly. Khaw’s solution is an homage to the London kitchen of the River Café’s Ruth Rogers, designed by her late husband, architect Richard Rogers. “They have this amazing kitchen, which I’ve always loved, and it imitates that.”
Perhaps due to her avid love of film and eagle eye for aesthetics, Khaw’s design approach involves giving houses a personality. “Say it’s an old house in Vaucluse, it’s a grand old lady, and she just needs a little bit of surgery,” she says. “This apartment was almost like this ’80s yuppy guy who had seen better days. In his time, he would’ve been in his prime, but he is looking pretty tired now. I wanted to clean him up, simplify him and bring him into the 2020s.”
Khaw has always loved interior design – at the age of 14, “I sponged my room to give it a very bad Venetian plaster finish,” and she didn’t necessarily think of this eagerness as representing a career path. Investment banking was her first career, but after a couple of years, her now-husband asked her to come with him to Paris where he went to business school. “I quit my job knowing that I would never return to that world.” It was there that Khaw started sourcing antiques for a dealer in Sydney, and that ended up being her “soft entry” into the design industry.
A stretch in London soon followed, including a valuable stint working with Anouska Hempel. “She did these very theatrical interiors, almost like a set designer, with no view to practicality at all,” says Khaw. “A lounge room that was completely black – she would specify bowls and chopsticks in the dining room to be black as well.” The luxury scale, budgets and uncompromised vision were something Khaw hadn’t encountered before. “But it was fun because she just bulldozed her way through the scope that someone would give her and just gave them what she wanted.”
Standing by an aesthetic vision would drive Khaw to start her own practice when she was back in Sydney studying at TAFE NSW Design Centre Enmore. She and Handelsmann partnered up in 2016. “I think that the meeting of our minds definitely produced something that neither of us could have thought of individually,” she reflects. “We definitely created something between us organically that is much better than I could have done by myself.” Last year marked a significant moment for the team of six, with Handelsmann + Khaw now headquartered on the storied William Street in Sydney’s Paddington. “It was baby steps for many, many years,” says Khaw. “Coming to William Street was a big step up, but it happened at the right time.”
And while the interior designer would’ve loved a heritage dwelling to layer her distinctive style with, Khaw has grown to love her forever home. “I count myself pretty lucky to be living in such a Sydney spot that makes you feel like you’re in the centre of it. It gives you energy and it definitely feeds my creativity. It’s a rare combination of feeling super urban and seeing changes in nature.”
Architecture by Klaus Carson Studio. Interior design by Gillian Khaw. Build by Verdecon. Landscape design by Katherine Land Gardens. Sliding doors by Vitrocsa. Artwork by Bill Henson, James Lemon and TC Overson, and from Orient House and The Vault Sydney.
- 项目文案：Virginia Jen
- 项目摄影：Anson Smart
- 摄影布景：Joseph Gardner
- 转载自：The Local Project
- 图片@The Local Project
- 语言：英语
- 编辑：序赞网
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