Betsy Brennan writes about Geoffrey Clark’s renovation of an Australian shadowy narrow terrace to a French country style luminous home. VOGUE LIVING (AUSTRALIA). December/January 1992/93. Page 114. Photography by RODNEY WEIDLAND

Geoffrey Clark takes the laid-back Australian version of French country style to a dark narrow terrace.

“We live in such a shorts and T-shirt lifestyle, to sit on silk damask just doesn’t jell,” says Geoff Clark. “It’s nothing to do with the level of sophistication: you can have a great richness and style – but our way of life is to be able to come and plonk down anywhere.” The point is made beautifully in the house he has renovated for a young Sydney client; even more precisely, in one piece of furniture, the camelback sofa in the double drawing room. The style is Louis XV but the fabric is simple check linen. Similarly, heavy tapestry fabric on the high-back walnut chairs was eschewed for another simple check.

“We have enough warmth and vigour in our climate, we don’t have to stimulate ourselves with hectic interiors. Our mood comes through light, not through fabrics. The idea here was to create calm, easy spaces to live in, smart but not pretentious, comfortable and inviting.”

When Geoff Clark and his client first saw it, the house was dark and dismal with a juke box in the front room. Irresistible. “it was built in 1902, with a typical terrace format – very long and thin, almost a bowling alley,” says Clark.“ The aim was to disguise the length of the building, open it onto the garden – you could only get out through the laundry – and introduce light. The building ran east-west, with a party wall on the northern boundary, so the whole house faced south.”

They opened the central dining room to the garden with three pairs of French doors, the laundry was moved upstairs (“where all the laundries should be, near the source”) and the vacated space, still with its original tiles, made into a generous television room off the kitchen. To increase the level of light, walls were painted Dulux ‘White Birch’, curtains made of pale silk or calico to give a creamy ambiance, and a skylight, backlit at night, was installed the length of the upstairs corridor. “Basically we made a ceiling out of opaque white glass, which diffuses the light. In fact, it’s a skylight, built in with plaster mouldings.”

The entrance to the house is on the western side, into a long, wide hall with rooms opening off it. A major plus was the scale of the spaces, particularly the magnificent double drawing room. Here there were three windows: Victorian bay window with leadlights, a set of French doors with a different glazing and a 1920s timber framed window, all with different head heights.

“We had silk curtains made to come almost to the ceiling, with a fixed head to hide the different heights.” Doors to the hall were cut in halves to make two pairs of French doors, but little was done architecturally to the main rooms. “We worked on a tight budget, there weren’t the funds to make a major architectural statement,” the designer comments. “The furniture carries the house.”

Some of this was already in the owner’s collection. More was sourced from Clark’s French provincial-oriented The Country Trader in Paddington, and other Sydney dealers. “Although the main rooms were grand in scale, with massive arch and its Corinthian columns, the idea was not to build on that – not to fight it, but to make it sit comfortably,” says Clark. “It’s easy to fly over the top, but the fabrics we chose were more human, more Australian. A lot of the fabrics we see in Australia are designed for Europe, for cold winters and weak light, not the strength of our sunlight and the way we live.”
Cost also determined carpet for the main rooms rather than stripped and polished timbre floors; centring two seating areas are two sublime tiger rugs of Tibetan wool from Robyn Cosgrove Rugs.

New bathrooms were put in and the kitchen updated with tongue-and-groove cupboards in a putty colour influenced by the original wall and floor tiles. The country mood is heightened with the gleam of copper, old white kitchen china and English splat-back chairs around an old Spanish table.

Of immeasurable importance to the scheme of things is the courtyard garden. Nearly every room in the house looks out to this brick-paved, green and growing place with its borders of impatiens, its box topiary, plinths and 19th century French urns. Originally it was several steps below the house, a concrete slab completely tiled in the bathroom variety. “We pulled that out and made two areas, one off the dining room, one by the pool, and created a folly between. Then we raised the whole thing to the level of the interior and suddenly it became part of the house.” Camellias, azaleas and tubs of cypress define the path leading to the pool.

With clear-headed decisions on what was possible and appropriate, Clark and his client prove that silk-purse-from-sow’s-ear concept is alive and well.

BETSY BRENNAN
EDITOR: VIRGINIA RAYNER
VOGUE LIVING (AUSTRALIA).
December/January 1992/93. Page 114.
Photography by RODNEY WEIDLAND Back