Anna Spiro has long been hailed as Australia’s most original and creative interior designer. Her globally adored aesthetic is unapologetically maximalist and a paean to comfort; her devotion to the craft of working with pattern on pattern on pattern – combined with her intuitive layering of colours, objects old and new, art, books and foraged treasures – creates spaces that sing with individuality. In A Life in Pattern, Spiro offers up a lifetime of hard-earned wisdom, showing how the very best interiors come from following your own path.
Today, we’re featuring an extract from A Life in Pattern so you can read about Anna’s approach to decor in her very own words. Read on …
Photo by Tim Salisbury.
The Kooky and the Wild
Ever since I was a young girl, I would buck at anything my mother told me to wear. I never wanted to dress like all the other girls. I wanted to choose my own clothes and be different. It was my chance to express myself and explore my taste and style. I have always loved to be different, and embraced things that are a bit kooky and aren’t necessarily in fashion. My teachers at school used to say I had a wild imagination.
I think my ‘out-there’ creative ideas are my strong point, my advantage, and they form my own unique style. Even today, my children look at me sideways at times, trying to get a grasp on where I am coming from with my off-beat ideas. Most recently, my son Harry had a lot to say about the many different paint colours and wallpapers I had used in the first stage of my office–apartment renovation.
In both my design work and my fashion choices, I am always searching for special things; things that nobody else wants, things that aren’t necessarily cool. My heart skips a beat when I find a particular old piece of furniture or a stunning roll of fabric that I have never seen before. I don’t like to rehash the same fabrics over and over. There are so many incredible fabrics in the world, why not use something different each time? I like my designs to be fresh and full of interesting, contradictory elements.
Photo by Tim Salisbury.
Sometimes I do have favourite fabrics, but if I decide to use them again, I always find new, imaginative ways of putting them together. A lot of people try so hard to make everything match perfectly. To be honest, I am the complete opposite. I actually find it challenging to create a plain, straightforwardly matching scheme – it goes against every single grain in my body. What really excites me is throwing caution to the wind: painting the walls of a formal room in a wild, bright colour, then hanging them with dark old gilt-framed oil paintings; and juxtaposing that with fresh floral chintz-covered sofas placed on a modern geometric-patterned rug.
It’s these types of offbeat, playful concepts that really delight me. Clients come to me because they are attracted to my signature eclectic style, but I believe each of my clients needs to have their own look, their own individual style – and that’s what I try to help them unearth.
—A Life in Pattern by Anna Spiro (Thames & Hudson Australia) is out now.
A Life in Pattern
No one does colour and pattern like Anna Spiro.
Anna Spiro has long been hailed as Australia’s most original and creative interior designer. Her globally adored aesthetic is unapologetically maximalist and a paean to comfort; her devotion to the craft of working with pattern on pattern on pattern – combined with her intuitive layering of colours, objects old and new, art, books and foraged treasures – creates spaces that sing with individuality...
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