Jacqueline Maley writes about Geoffrey Clark’s life in the Interior Design and Events industry. FINANCIAL REVIEW - LUXURY MAGAZINE ’09 Life & Leisure. Pages 43 to 46.

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Story by: Jacqueline Maley

Photography by: Eric Walker

 

Country Trader founder Geoffrey Clark shares for antiques and his love of the deal.

 

GEOFFREY CLARK STARTED HIS CAREER QUITE LITERALLY AS A COUNTRY TRADER. THESE DAYS THE OPULENT SYDNEY ANTIQUES BUSINESS OF WHAT NAME IS HIS SHOWCASE — AND FOLLY

 

 

GEOFFREY CLARK is 48 years old and happily partnered, but he falls in love all the time. The antique dealer, interior designer and taste maker most recently swooned over a miniature wooden artist’s model with fully articulated joints. “I found it in Avignon, at a little day market,” he says. “It was covered in straw and cloth… it’s blonde wood with full ball joints, a beautiful graphic thing.”

            His affections will no doubt move on soon – they always do. Once he fell for a Madonna. He glimpsed her a street market in Pézenas, in southern France, and knew he had to have her.

            He stripped her of her hair and clothes and now she sits nude and bald on a mantelpiece of one of his clients, a list that ranges from Nicole Kidman and Paul Keating to Hermès Australia managing director Karin Upton Baker and former NSW Premier Neville Wran.

            Before the Madonna, it was a definitive French-blue kitchen country dresser that caught his eye, discovered in a farmhouse in Sassafras in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges. He loved it so much that he cleared his minivan of all the antiques he had gathered so he could bring it back to Sydney, where he promptly sold it to another dealer.

            Eventually, Clark traders everything in – houses, antiques, even, he confesses, boyfriends. “I don’t like the idea of furniture for life,” he says. “I like change.”

            It seems an odd philosophy for someone who specialises in exquisite, one-off pieces of antique furniture (as well as the odd wrought-iron gate, urn or garden fountain), many of which carry price tags that would make a Rothschild blush.

            Whether sourced from French châteaux, outback farmhouses or St Vincent de Paul op shops, every piece he picks to go into a client’s home – or add the enormous, cacophonous collection at his flagship Country Trader shop in Sydney’s Waterloo – is unique. That’s the only thing it must be. “Why look for something that is exactly the same as what’s next door?” he says.

“I look for different things and I’ve always approached antiques from a design point of view, rather than having a formal training. I’ve never really bought anything just because it’s rare. It doesn’t have to be rare to be beautiful.”

            It’s one of the contradictions in which Clark abounds: an antique dealer who couldn’t care less about rarity, a gourmet happy to eat fish and chips out of newspaper, a self-described trader capitalist who says he doesn’t care if people buy his stuff, and an intensely social being who’s intensely shy and loathes going out.

           

            That he prefers staying in is understandable when you see the exquisite spaces in which he spends most of his time – his house in inner-Sydney Darlinghurst and the cavernous, artfully ramshackle Waterloo store. Both places are the beautifully rendered results of his bowerbird eye. And because his taste is constantly changing, there is a consistent turnover of goods both at home and at work.

THE Waterloo store, which borrows much from the quirky display style of the flea market in Paris, is set up like a tumbledown country manor. Every room is an attic full of undiscovered treasures, as if compelled over a lifetime, by a slightly mad, exquisitely refined aunt. Faded leather chesterfields sit next to wheels plucked from 19^th Century wagons or a shelved cupboard once used by French cobblers to house rows and boots. An industrial lamp from a French military hospital illuminates a bundle of peasants’ straw basket with a backdrop of Japanese printed silk. The walls are covered in tapestries, the odd copy of Velázquez portrait and mirrors, lots of mirrors.

            It is impossibly beautiful and, Clark, admits, almost as perfectly economic, with an enormous inventory – the fruit of that insatiable appetite – that fully turns over only every two or three years. It is in fact the ultimate of his contradictions: he’s a self-professed wheeler-dealer who revels in the trade and disdains the very notion that sentiment or connoisseurship enters into the equation – yet he admits cheerfully that his antiques business doesn’t make a dollar.

            “It doesn’t run a loss if you don’t take into account return on capital,” he says. “That’s how I rationalise it.”

            His home is even grander, the design very much his own. With an architectural team, he has gutted the Darlinghurst Victorian terrace, taken out an entire floor so the ceiling are two storey high and installed an enormous sliding floor-to-ceiling glass doors at the rear. The result is a main room that, with its marble tiles and plinths, feels like a light filled museum – one you can lounge in.

            “I love calm architecture,” he says. “I think everything should resolve back down to the ground.”

            Such inner-city elegance is a fair way from Clark’s origins in downtown Goondiwindi, a farmer town on the Queensland-NSW border with a population of 5000 and recreational water park. His widowed mother opened a gift shop in the town and within it there was a silver cabinet that housed trinkets for the weddings, anniversaries and christenings of the local farmers and their families. This cabinet became Geoffrey’s responsibility.

            “I used to run around to auctions and buy silver spoons and soup ladles,” he says. “that got me into auction rooms. I don’t know why, but I was always fascinated by antiques.”

            The teenaged Clark was sent to boarding school, where he was good at art and mathematics, but a poor student overall. He didn’t know at the time, but he was dyslexic. As he puts it, he thought he was dumb – a fact that perhaps accounts for his hesitant, shy manner as an adult.

            Despite this, his love of design led him to enrol in an architecture course at the University of Sydney but he was soon given the boot, he says. “I couldn’t write,” he states matter-of-factly. “Spell check was around then. The dyslexia precluded higher education, which probably turned out to be great. At that stage, there were no jobs for architects anyway.”

            By then, he had already bought his first house – a brick terrace in Rozelle, in Sydney’s inner west, which was in a bad need of a makeover. He worked on it during summer breaks from his job as a builder’s labourer, before selling it at a profit.

            “That was a very wicked real estate time,” he says. “With the money, I did the classic 21-year-old thing and went and travelled Europe.”

            Over in the old world, Clark’s silver-hoarding habits quickly resurfaced, combined with his strong capitalist instinct. The young man was seduced by the relatively cheap price of antique silver in England and brought back two vinyl briefcases of the stuff.

            “I ended up opening a stall at the antique market at South Dowling Street [Surry Hills, Sydney], with furniture too,” he recounts. “From there, I went to Paddington Markets, where I had a table for a while. I sold all sort of things, antiques first and then I got onto a range of belts.”

            It was around this time when his country runs began – he bought a Ford minivan and every few months drove a loop from Sydney to Broken Hill, then on to the Barossa Valley, Adelaide, Melbourne, and then, depending on whether the van was full, either to Bega on the NSW South Coast or straight up the highway home.

            “I bought a lot of English mahogany, high polished balloon-back chairs,” he says. “The country look was just starting, so we did a lot of kitchen dressers and kitchen tables and white-and-blue striped jugs.”

Around the time of the Bicentenary in 1988, Australian colonial furniture came into fashion. The pieces unearthed were generally wrought in rough materials and their design geared towards expedience, rather than beauty.

            But Clark found beauty in their rawness and ingenuity. He began collecting them. “I had the network already set up and started getting some amazing things – part primitive furniture and part Depression pieces,” he says. “It’s about being forced to make do. I found lots of things made out of wooden boxes, tin cans and hand-axed gum branches.”

 

A similarly improvisatory spirits explains the great conundrum of The Country Trader: how a vast Aladdin’s cave of a store – the sort of place where you might find the corner of a ruined chapel, the sort of place that would struggle to find a rich enough supporting seam of individuals in a population centre like New York or Paris – stays afloat.

            In fact, the retail outlet makes financial sense if you think of as a sort of loss leader, the theatre set that anchors the Geoffrey Clark brand that feeds into his property, design, event and cross-promotion operations. These are the real earners, although he admits that the real engine of his business, private interior design commissions, has suffered during the financial crisis.

            That mix has been [part of the business almost from the beginning. In 1984, when he opened his first store in Glenmore Road, Paddington, he started organising events for high profile clients such as Hermes or Dunhill, as well as private weddings. In 1990, he moved into a larger store on Oxford Street, Paddington, and it was around there that his architecture and interiors consultancy began.

            Unlike most other dealers, he would lend clients pieces to see if they worked in their homes. Some began asking him to consult in their houses, and from there the business grew. It now accounts 65 per cent of his company’s revenue.

            “When I consult for someone, I spend a lot of time with them,” he says. “I go through their house and ask them how they use their space. I ask ‘What side of the bed do you sleep on?’ and ‘Why does your house work? What do your kids do? How long are you going to be here?’ “

            Linda Gregoriou, an urban designer and friend, says that for all Clark’s sophistication, there is zero preciousness in the interiors he creates.

“He has a very European sensibility mixed with an Australian aesthetic that uses patina and rawness,” she says. “Not many people understand that not everything that’s expensive is beautiful. Geoff understands the sense of mixing the not-so-expensive with the expensive.”

When Clark was bought out of his Paddington digs in the late 1990’s, it was time for a change. He decided he wanted to lead the charge into a new design precinct. Sydney didn’t have one, so he set about creating it.

Waterloo was still a shabby semi-industrial area, but he saw parallels with New York’s Meatpacking District and had grand dreams of a design hub like the D&D centre in New York. He wanted to make it a destination shopping centre for unique design concepts stores, with generous public spaces, that could also house industry exhibitions. The retail space now known as pyd was born.

It was an enormous gamble. He did not lock in tenets until the project was substantially completed, and he ploughed an extra 20 per cent of his own money into the building to ensure its finishes were up to his exacting standards.

At one stage, when the project went above cost, he was saved by two individual sponsors who had been part of the plan’s initial research and development.

“ I think Geoff’s a great innovator and I think he’s very clever,” says Neale Whitaker, editor-in-chief of Belle magazine, who has known Clark fro about five years. “{Geoff was the first to develop an interiors business in Waterloo and others followed. Waterloo is now established as Sydney’s alternative design hub.”

The move made Country Trader a destination shop, and the space let Clark express his style on the grand scale he prefers.

“The Country Trader is like nowhere else,” Whitaker says. “It’s like going into another world. It’s become part of the Sydney vernacular, a way to describe an interior. You could say a house is ‘very Country Trader’.”

This bijou branding has ensured the success of Clark’s events business, anchored by his famous dinners, which are top-of-the-pile invitation for Sydney’s smart set. They are opulent events, with large rowdy tables and chandeliers, plus delicious food, of which you are offered second and third servings, and plenty of very good wine. Afterwards you might just get a cross-promotional package of the music featured, the various brands that shone so bright on the night. It’s a way of turning his impeccable credentials as a taste maker into coin.

On one occasion, he set guests twittering with a live food display – a beautiful man sitting up in bed, carving a salmon among the bedclothes. “They’re decadent, almost theatrical, but always have a high level of taste,” Whitaker says. “He has a wonderful eye. It’s all about the detail, the ambiance he creates, the look, the style, the way he dresses the room, everything form the glasses to the plates and the napery, the music playing… he just knows how to do it.”

It is precisely the kind of at-home entertaining Clark loves, full of personal touches like meat carved à table and breaks for rhacous poetry readings.

“I think we’ve become very disconnected from each other,” he says, when asked for the inspiration behind his dinners. “It’s only when you relax in comfortable surroundings that you start to see and talk to a person. I’d rather go and sit in the park and eat fish and chips from a newspaper that go to a restaurant. At least is tactile.”

And if his interior design business has suffered, Clark says his elegant, at-home (if you live in an 19^th-century manor house, that is) dining style is very much in tune with the financial crisis, when corporations still wish to entertain but in a more low-key way.

“I think there’s a perceivable shift in entertaining,” he says. “People still want to do it but they don’t want to be seen to do it. We’ve done all sort of things at The Country Trader – bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, corporate dinners for people who don’t want to be seen at [Sydney restaurant] Aria.

“People know how we give a party and it’s generous. It’s big portions; it’s comfortable. Which is how most things should be.” LUXURY            

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