House tour: inside Bob Hawke and Blanche Hawke’s Sydney home, reimagined
A random phone call led designer Nina Maya to a dream commission—to transform the interiors of the former Sydney home of Australia’s longest serving Labor prime minister.
In an era when sharp political discourse has dulled down to sanitised soundbites and cancel culture keeps the party room gagged, who doesn’t long for some of the intellectual larrikinism of the late Bob Hawke, the longest serving Australian Labour prime-minister who unapologetically lived out loud.
‘Hawkey’ blared his iconoclasm with a unifying bravura that convinced all Australians of their unassailable right to equal opportunity, be it in his shaping of historic workplace accords or the building of his Northbridge home—a five-storey ‘edifice complex’ in glass and steel towering over the sparkling waters of Sydney’s Sugarloaf Bay.
Testifying to the rise of a lowly ACTU research officer to the leader of federal government, the archly contemporary architecture, completed in 1993, was for Australia’s 23rd PM, both a figurative and formal watershed; albeit one fitted with a private jetty, a gentlemen’s club, five palatial bedrooms and a pro-standard rooftop putting-green.
The house post-dated Hawke’s deposition as prime minister by his deputy Paul Keating (1991), platformed his very public split from first wife Hazel (1995) and back-dropped his marriage to writer Blanche d’Alpuget (1995) who, more than two decades later, would speak of his last breath exhaling (2019) in the master bedroom.
For Nina Maya, the former fashion company founder turned interior designer who was tapped to tender for the building’s refurbishment by the new owners after Hawke and d’Alpuget bought into smaller harbourside apartment, the weight of legacy must have been leaden.
“Yes, it was one of the more unusual situations,” understates Maya of fielding Hawkey’s ghost in a “gift” commission that ensued from an “out-of-the-blue” request to meet with architect Ian Traill—a designer she didn’t know, working for a client-couple she’d never met. “But isn’t it always the random calls in life, that reward?”
She remembers Traill’s scouting visit to her home—a tardis magicked from the tiny footprint of a pushed-over Paddington bungalow—and his enthusiastic approval of its spatial trickery and textured minimalism. She believes his walk-through won her the project tender and vindication over parental cautions that she was crazy to buy the site.
“But then colouring my teenage bedroom beige was my parent’s definition of madness,” she adds with the laughing share that her wildly artistic mother had painted every wall of the family home a different vivid hue. “I remember her crying, ‘what is wrong with you?”
Rebellion against prevailing norms reveals as a repeat thing for Maya who tells of founding a fashion company in Italy at the age of 20 with nought but naïve dreams and a general design degree. “Again, with the you’ve got to be crazy,” she says of ignoring advice and diving straight in.
“I joined forces with a family run business in Bologna and produced my first sample range which David Jones picked up. We were straight out of the blocks and running.” The no-fear narrative continues with the designer describing six years of health-compromising stress until one customer, then a Sydney correspondent for The New York Times, invited her to translate her fashion sensibilities to the fit-out of a small Potts Point apartment.
“She just handed me the keys and left on assignment,” Maya says with the shoulder-shrug ask of how much harder could it be than fashion. “I just phoned my uncle the painter for the number of a good plumber, who gave me the name of an excellent joiner.”
Referrals greased the cogs of a nascent design machine as Maya rounded up a crack team of contractors, grew a client base and ditched the fashion shingle, all of which answers to the question of parrying with ‘national’ legacy in new living rooms. “Don’t overthink it, just do it.”
And do it, she did, after being served a loose brief by a client couple who were keen to sail the seven seas and simply return to the sort of ‘Maya look’ they’d gleaned in magazines—a pure white page, scored with deep luxury lines, allowing the inhabitants to write their own story. All with a prologue by Hawkey of course.
She recalls the new clients’ wish to keep the man-cave mood of the ‘club’ room with their auction purchase of Hawke’s original pool table and a trilogy of photographic portraits by Richard Freeman depicting the former PM puffing on a cigar. Ironically, Hawke’s taste for leaf-wrapped tobacco was reportedly denied all in-house indulgence by the body-corporate of his future home, causing the ex-PM to protest that he would leave Northbridge in a box and d’Alpuget to later concede that “he got his own way”.
Maya remembers “Blanche’s kind offer” of a pre-settlement house tour and her remonstration about any alteration to it. “Well, I can’t imagine what you’d want to change, she says, invoking d’Alpuget’s forthright tone. “Obviously nothing major.” The designer laughs and drops into her own hesitant voice, “Oh, no, no, just a few little tweaks here and there”.
Little tweaks? “OK, big tweaks,” she concedes of Traill’s major relocation of the pool (pictured) and “rationalisation of the rabbit warren of rooms” that confounded orientation and the ingress of light.
“As much as possible we reinstated scale, removed walls, heightened ceilings, floated stairs across five levels, clarified circulation routes and installed full height glazing on every level,” she says. “Ian masterfully massaged the whole thing, gave us the clean slate and clear sight lines to sparkling waters, boats and lush greenery.”
They replaced the flooring, formerly a colourful patchworking of carpet and rugs, with a house-wide continuum of large-format white porcelain tiles, indoors and out, to both merge dedicated spaces and mess with the perception of their limits.
“We kept it completely minimal, then customised lighting, curtains and upholstery,” Maya adds, comparing her shades-of-white tactility to the sensual liveability of French designer Josef Dirand.
“Nearly all the furniture specified was by European designers, but just as the pandemic hit, pricing and freight blew the budget out by almost double. The client called it madness to be paying so much more than the value of the goods, so we had almost everything custom-made here in Australia.”
Calling on the crafted conceptualism of such multidisciplinary Sydney creatives as Ollie Tanner and Ashley Corbett-Smith, who hand-forged lights, fashioned tables and cast installations with a Noguchi-like regard for organic form and soothing psychic energy, Maya pushed uncertainty and materiality to the edge. One of the concessions to off-shore making came with the modelling of the master bathroom into a graphic mountain-scape of Arabescato marble; one more pragmatically shaped and shipped in from Italy.
Surely, the former PM would approve of such holistic Australian structure and substance? Maya hopes there is enough balance between gravitas, levity and maverick design to serve the memory of Hawke who, as the current governor of West Australia Kim Beasley eulogised, “whether you agreed or not, your happiness was his motive.”
