MARJOLAINE LERAY
St Tropez arrives with this zesty watermelonhued shopping haven in Sydney’s Woollahra
It’s a kind of love story, the way I found Sydney,” says Marjolaine Leray, the French-born owner of Alm, Sydney’s newest and arguably most colourful destination for inspirational one-off art and homewares. “My daughter wanted to study here and after visiting I fell in love with the city.” It wasn’t too long after that initial visit that Leray took a lease on a retail space in leafy Woollahra, had it painted watermelon pink — a reference to the Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel — and moved, along with her daughter, from her home in the South of France. She’s now on the lookout to buy a house in the neighbourhood surrounding the store, which first opened its doors last August. An ex-art gallery owner and investment bankerturned-interior designer, Leray says her foray into interiors started almost by chance. “I studied forestry and wildlife, then mechanical engineering,” she says. “I looked for a job and couldn’t find one so did an MBA. Then I ran out of money, which is why I went into investment banking. At the same time I had art galleries in Paris and New York.
I was always interested in art but I definitely didn’t think I was creative.”
After 18 years working in finance Leray made a sea change and moved with her then seven-year-old daughter from Paris to the South of France, back to the village where she grew up. It was here, in the hilltop town of Ramateulle, just a few minutes’ drive from St Tropez, that Leray realised her dream of making a 17th-century chateau her home, restoring its decaying grandeur and transforming the atmospheric cellar, historically used to press olive oil, into her first gallery-meets-retail space in 2005. In the years that followed, Leray’s business organically evolved into three concept spaces, all within walking distance from each other — the original cellar, or Le Pressoir, filled with new and vintage furniture, art and homewares; a pocketsized boutique in the centre of Ramateulle offering smaller objets such as paintings and ceramics, with Leray’s interior design agency housed just next door; and an expansive threestorey, 400-square-metre space, which integrates quirky furnishings and art with a fabric workshop. There’s a sense of provenance, poetry and high-low charm in Leray’s curatorial approach
to retail — from India Mahdavi’s Cap Martin rattan chairs, made just an hour away from Ramateulle, to Piet Hein Eek’s renowned Waste Table in Scrapwood, and Mabeo, a line of bespoke, sustainable furniture by Botswana-based designer Peter Mabeo. “It’s not about a certain pricepoint, luxury materials or designer names,” she says.
“It just has to be unique.”
Since moving to Sydney and opening a fourth store in her newly adopted home, Leray has also become a champion of Australian art and design. Recently, in Ramateulle, she hosted an exhibition of recent works by Australian artists Alicia Taylor, James King, Kerry Armstrong and Antonia Mrljak. Right now visitors to her Woollahra store can see the surreal photography by Sydney-Melbourne duo Honey Long and Prue Stent. She’s also a fan of designer Trent Jansen, stocking pieces from his limited-edition Broached Monsters collection now on show at the National Gallery of Victoria. “He’s truly wonderful,” says Leray. “I mentioned him to [the Milanese gallerist] Rossana Orlandi and I’m hoping for both of them that his work will be shown in Milan in 2019.”
Back in her French hometown, Leray has quietly and humbly built up an impressive international design business with projects spanning restaurants, stores and private homes in France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Here in Australia she says her focus will be mostly to source unique objets, furnishings and art — including her own creations, such as repurposed mirrors, furniture and textiles — for the local interiors industry. “I’m also thinking of introducing fashion to the store, which I’ve not done before. I’m in love with the work of a designer called Adjara, and also Franck Sorbier,” she says, referencing one of the few independent couturiers in Paris whose latest collection was made entirely from plantderived materials. “His work is original, he goes beyond his comfort zone and is an environmental activist in his own way. He heckles traditional rules and adds a little humour in a universe of poetry.” Not unlike the talented Leray herself.