Little by little

Over the course of five years, this Melbourne residence has turned the dial for elegant extravagance right up with no detail overlooked in the tailored and glamorous result.

AAsked to recount the when and where of this Melbourne mansion dropping into his design lap, architect Travis Walton thinks back to 2014 and one of those storied New York bars where fabulous creatures hold court and Old Fashioneds flow. He remembers a Midtown meeting with former clients and an introduction to their friends, Areti and Panagiotis, “two bons vivants in beautiful dress” who lit up the room and registered an interest in his work.

Walton recalls the first mutterings of a design commission being made with considerable understatement. “I’ve got a little project for you,” he whispers in imitation of Panagiotis’s broach to build a new house. “Yeah, we do little projects,” the architect adds in repeat of his own nonplussed presumption that it must be a minor enterprise.

The absurd undersell of said “little project” is now amplified by Walton’s dwarfed presence in the palatial foyer of its finished outcome — 2000 square metres built by Davies Henderson, premised on the BC classicism of Greek temples and the AD (Always Decorative) flamboyance of Gucci.

“This is five years of my life,” says the architect who has run the design equivalent of a marathon then been told to go again. “I just had to find the people who could realise my clients’ vision; travel all around the world looking for masters and their makings — Los Angeles, New York, all over Europe. It is literally one of the hardest things that I have ever done, but I’m coming out the other side.”

Declaring zero margin for error in details and materials that are no longer viable in residential architecture, Walton breaks down the 25 components concealed in the archways that stream passage from the ‘power’ entry into a field-size formal living room to the left, and a study styled with all the empirical grunt of Napoleon’s war room to the right.

Classicism is visibly probed through every peak period of the ‘ism’, from a façade defined by the giant Doric order to a foyer fizzing with floral-scroll mouldings in French Renaissance style, to an outer garden given all the manicured precision of Petit Trianon by landscape architect Jack Merlo.

The continuum of restrained historicism is overlaid with reflections of the current Zeitgeist. Imagine director Wes Anderson doing a remake of Clash of the Titans and you have its quirky dynamism; one that distils in the foyer-sited bust of Sophocles, whose blindfolding gives weight to his words: “Every man can see things far off but is blind to what is near.”

And what is near to Walton, as he gazes up to a stainedglass dome deserving of Tiffany Studios, through a supernova of crystals said to be the chandelier sourced from the sale of Hollywood producer Aaron Spelling’s home, is a standard of craftsmanship lost to a bygone world.

“That took six months to finesse on site,” says Walton of the flax-tinted glass dome with hand-painted roses that supposedly glow like Burmese rubies at night. “Little project, indeed.”

He notes the over-scale of brass casement windows and the curving sweep of a stair fit for the Élysée Palace in Paris and refutes all notion that little is subjective. This is ‘grand’ writ large with interlinking Gs across a mansion made for modern-day Greek gods. On cue, Aphrodite, who announces her mortal self as “Areti”, alights from her first-floor stratosphere to welcome all to her minor Mount Olympus.

Between plying food prepped by a chef who slips between a concealed service kitchen and its on-show counterpart — a monumental altar of stone and brass — Areti effuses about her four children and a love of fashion, “particularly Gucci”.

That love expresses with largesse in a first-floor boudoir that is off-the-charts big, fitted with banks of Gucci-filled cabinets and furnished with one-of-a-kind art and objects commissioned by the Italian fashion house in esteem of her patronage. Love? This is the sort of commitment to style that sustains couture, the dazzling emerald sequined manifestation of which drapes a dummy in the dressing-room corner.

Declaring it a love-at-first-sight dress, Areti imparts the story of its haute making, starting with Nicole Kidman’s red-carpet reveal of its counterpart at the 2017 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards and ending with Gucci’s iridescent re-imagining of it for Areti to wear to her daughter’s wedding.

No, she will never be the poster girl for Normcore, but this woman’s intuitive grasp of the culture and the contradictions of ‘right now’ is bang on and built into every room by Walton who has materialised her wild vision into such goddessworthy relic as a bath hewn from single-slab black stone.

Her home stands in holistic validation of the credo that fashion is more than just a good dress, as was declared by Gucci’s deified creative director Alessandro Michele in recent conversation with Vogue’s Hamish Bowles. “It’s a bigger reflection of history and social change and very powerful things,” he said. “If you want to produce something new, especially now, you need more languages.”

And those multi tongues talk with maximal fluency across the 20-metre-long landscape of a formal living room in which a “favourite” work by Russian arts collective AES+F, The Feast of Trimalchio, Arrival of the Golden Boat (2010), encodes the house-wide conviction that beauty no longer has limits or rules. This digitally collaged tableau, telling of the gluttonous trappings of wealth within a classical framework, informs all the colour, period clash and wry commentary that Walton and his design team have worked into wider furnishing and fine art. The polarity play of old and new, classical and digital, established and emerging, high-end and humourous speaks entirely to the couple’s provenance and personalities, which Areti rounds off as “fearless and fun”.

Feigning sympathy for the boredom that Walton “must be suffering now that the house is complete,” she laughs and looks to the architect for comment. He draws breath, then declares “that if another person walks through my office door and says they’ve got a little project, I’ll say ‘let me show you little.’” traviswalton.com.au