THIS OLD HOUSE

MAGGIE MACKELLAR

will sprinkle a pattern of ancient oats on the entrance table, drop dust over wiped surfaces and drape cobwebs from high ceilings. Getting it ready for the wedding was giving me nightmares, and to make the situation just that bit more challenging, I became overly ambitious on the tennis court and tore much-needed ligaments in my knee. I was not unflustered.

But what I want to tell you is that none of this mattered. The people arrived, laden with gifts and grog, food and flowers. Beds were made to sleep the multitude. We had food in the fridges, and the house shone with love rather than furniture polish. As I limped from job to job the burden of details lifted, and what has stayed with me is not the labour, but the feeling a house can give when it expands and welcomes everyone who comes through the banging screen door. Once the house was full of people, I stopped caring about cobwebs or that the roses would be spectacular a week too late. It all went off beautifully, and the next day the house wrapped its arms around all the tired people. The kettle was refilled again and again. Hungover fathers read stories to toddlers while breastfeeding mothers rolled their eyes. I hobbled around the kitchen with a smile and cooked six dozen eggs and four kilos of bacon, and as I did I rubbed against the stone walls and forgave them their dust.

FOR GENERATIONS, Charles

Wilson’s family has farmed land near Forbes, in central-western

NSW. He grew up in an 1870s farmhouse, which he has now inherited and visits every month.

Yet Charles, 52, is uncomfortable being depicted as “a country bloke”.

“I actually wanted to escape all that,” he says. “Growing up in an isolated place in the country, design to me was designing a future – a parallel universe. There was something wonderful and exotic about Italian modernism; it’s a fantasy of living in a different place and time. And that fantasy and escape is still a big part of my work.”

So Charles headed for the bright lights as soon as he finished school, and studied industrial design at Sydney College of the Arts. After graduating in 1991, he was crowned Best Young Designer of the Year by the Design Institute of Australia. He’s barely stopped since, with commissions ranging from a modern reinterpretation of a colonial-era tallboy for design studio Broached Commissions to ultra-contemporary lights for King Living. He’s won an Australian Design Award and Bombay Sapphire Design Discovery Award, and officially earned his place in Australian design history when the Powerhouse Museum acquired both his SW1 Swivel Chair and his Candelabra, created for Danish design firm Menu.

Asked which of his pieces he’s proudest of, Charles names that candelabra, along with the Zaza sofa for King Living, which is a staple in his own farmhouse. “It sells well, too,” he says, with a practical eye for the bottom line. “I also have the Solifiore floor lights I designed for King Living. I actually have a lot of my own furniture in the farmhouse,” he says. “Growing up in a big, simple country homestead, it’s a house I really love. So I want to design furniture that is comfortable in a house like that.”

That timeless quality is proven by another commission he’s proud of: the Carafe table for Herman Miller. “The brief for that was to cater for a home kitchen/office, which was a term that hadn’t even been invented in 2014 when I received the brief. But in 2020, that has become very much an issue.” Good design, of course, doesn’t date.

Charles resists labelling his style, but, when pressed, says he creates “complex organic structures” that, yes, sometimes have a certain agricultural influence. “My Serif stool is a good example. It was designed as a sort of industrial discard, with an aesthetic of reuse.” The bright orange metal stool is reminiscent of both a tractor and – in the version with the foot rest – of a tree. His tallboy, too, while sophisticated cabinetry handcrafted from French-polished blackwood, is braced by struts inspired by the windmills and water tanks he saw daily as a child.

So however much he may once have wished to, it’s perhaps true to say Charles can’t escape his rural roots. During lockdown, he left his apartment in Sydney’s Potts Point and retreated to the farmhouse with his son Jem, three, and Jem’s mother. There he designed and made a swing for Jem out of – what else? – an old tractor seat he found in the property’s old blacksmith’s shed. It isn’t, he warns, a sign of things to come. “I’m not about to start a career in sculptures welded from scrap metal!” he says.

It’s true: his aesthetic is far from rustic. But it does betray his roots, and the fact that his creative eye and practical skills were nurtured right here, in this old farmhouse.

See Charles’ King Living designs at kingliving.com.au